2805: How To Know When It's The Right Time To Cut

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“How do you know when it's a good time to start a cut?”

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I'm talking right now, hit pause, head on over to MindPumpStore.com. That's it. Joy the rest of the show. Cutting, it's the process of getting leaner, but it's very difficult, oftentimes the determine, when it's the right time, in fact, most people make a big mistake.

They start cutting at the wrong time, and this is what really screws them up. So, we're going to talk about that.

“How do you know when it's the right time to go on a cut?”

I think this is actually one of those things that isn't talked about enough, and we assumed that as soon as you get back into exercising or back into your routine that you start right off on a cut, and even though this is a little bit different, talking about competitors, bikini competitors, men's physique, body builders, but I wouldn't take a client on that was trying to compete that had already determined their show until I had a chance

to train them in the offseason first before we determine their show for the reasons that

we'll probably get into right now, because where you're at, calorie maintenance wise, metapolically, before you go into cut, is so important to success of that cut. It's one of the biggest, yes, so here's a deal. Everybody goes on a cut when they work out. I should say most people, like most people work out because they want to get leaner.

It's the number one fitness goal. So it's super common, everybody tries it, everybody fails. If you look at the data on weight loss, this is some of the best data we have around fitness. We don't have a lot of good data on building muscle or improving athletic performance.

We have some, but not a lot. But the one that's measured the most is weight loss because it's the most common goal. And what we see is, within a year, almost 90% of the people that lose weight gain it back.

And if you extend it out, I've always made this argument.

If they extend those studies out by three, four years, I bet you it's closer to 95%. Which means you have a point, you know, you have a, a 5% chance of long term over a few years success with weight loss. And one of the reasons why people consistently fail, while you're going to fail is because you do this at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

And this is almost always going to lead to failure. So I think we should back up first for people who aren't familiar with the word cut. Like what does that mean? It means you're, you're pursuing your diet or looking at your diet and trying to change it in a way to lose body fat.

That's what a cut is. Cut is, I'm trying to lose calories, body fat. And the terminology that we're using is cut. Now I like to extend this, this way, I would communicate this my clients. And I'd say, the goal of a cut is to lose body fat, but to keep it off forever.

So people that ever add that second part, it's like, I want to lose body fat.

Well, do you want to give it back? Of course not. I would add one more to that. Our goal is to lose body fat and maintain as much lean body mass of course. Of course, of course.

“Which I think is very important to add to that that doesn't get added to that many times.”

It's, I just need to lose weight, you know, the client comes to you and they say they want to lose 50 pounds. And I don't care.

on the scale.

And they're not coming to you saying, like, hey, I would like to lose 50 pounds of

just body fat, it's, I just want to lose 50 pounds on the scale.

“And this, it's, and why it's so important to understand the difference of that is because”

somebody could theoretically go down 50 pounds on the scale and actually see their body fat percentage go up or stay the same. If they've lost the ton of muscle, yeah. Yeah. Body fat percentage is what matters.

And if you had, you know, someone who was a 100 pounds with 10 pounds of body fat on them and then they suddenly weigh 200 pounds, they gained a 100 pounds of muscle on these and crazy numbers here, with the same 10 pounds of body fat, they're much leaner, okay. If you lose a bunch of muscle with your body fat, you become a smaller, same or relatively same body fat percentage version of yourself.

You've actually just lost strength and function by losing weight on the scale and losing muscle.

Not to mention, muscle is so metabolically active that you've made it so much more difficult

to maintain that weight loss because you've, in essence, slowed down your metabolism. You essentially reduce the amount of calories your body can run on because you've lost so much muscle. And so now you're in this crazy position, which a lot of people have experienced, I'm sure many more runaway.

There's nowhere to go. Yeah, a lot of people, I'm sure, have experienced this, it's like, oh yeah, I want to really restrict the calorie diet, started running, lost a lot of weight on the scale and then to keep it off, it's like, I had to eat, like, just keep eating very little. And then when I went to try to eat more or I went off on a vacation or suddenly again

on this body fat, it's like, yeah, you met a bottle, you put yourself in a metabolic disadvantage because of the muscle that you lost. So I'm glad you added that, Adam, the cut is the attempt to lose only body fat, keep or build muscle, and keep that body fat off forever. I think that would be a great definition for successful cut.

Right. And I'm sure anybody listening right now would be like, yes, that's exactly what I want.

“So I'm going to start with the reasons why you should not go on a cut.”

Not necessarily why you should go on a cut.

And I'll start with the first one where people are going to hear this and go, what

are you talking about, I thought that was the goal. Don't go on a cut because you feel you're too fat. Now, yes, the goal is to lose body fat, but if it's just because you think you're too fat and you don't look at everything else with what's going on, you oftentimes will put yourself in a bad position.

We have to set you up properly. So in other words, to put it differently, the reason you go on a cut isn't just because you have too much body fat, there's lots of other things you have to look at before you go on the cut. It's not just you have too much body fat.

You know, this, this also reminds me of how much I love Dr. Gabriel Lyons message. And I think that we need to change the conversation around this. In fact, if we, if we stopped looking at somebody who looks like they're 50 pounds or 100 pounds overweight and said, oh, that person's overweight or fat and said things like

“other under muscle and we thought from that perspective, which is very true.”

This person who's got all this weight is, it's sarcopeneas more common in the obese. Sarcopeneas is low muscle mass. There's this, there's this myth of this thinking, if someone's overweight, they have actually a more muscle. They actually don't.

When they do body scans, we find people who are obese have less muscle and their muscles less healthy. Yeah. And they're what's, it's crazy because it's so contradictory, you know, bariatric treatments, like slim fast, like a lot of these programs for weight loss, they immediately jump into

the low calorie situations without considering like what, how much lean mass do they even have to begin with? And, you know, to build that is going to benefit them so much better long term. Well, this is why I want to change that conversation because I feel like if people who are listening right now who think they are, they have 50 pounds of fat or they're 100 pounds

overweight, thought to themselves, oh, no, what I am, I'm really under muscle. And you, you said that instead, your approach towards how you approach exercise and fitness might look different. Like because if you go to the gym, they're comfortable with different. Yeah.

And you, and you said, hey, I, I don't have a problem with 50 pounds of being overweight. I have a problem with being under muscle, then the whole mindset and the approach looks completely different, which will serve that person who initially wants to lose that. And we'll get to that. So if you're listening right now and you're confused over that, don't worry.

We're going to get to exactly what that means. Here's another, not great reason to go on a cut. You want to get ready for an event. I got to get in shape for Vegas, I'm going to the beach, I'm getting married. I know this is a very popular reason to go on a diet.

But when you give yourself this time frame, this event, the odds of failure, which were already dismal are now zero, sorry, excuse me, are now 100%.

this one event, what almost always happens is when the event is over and the pressure of

the event is off, you're out of there. Not to mention the means by which you try to get in shape, quote unquote, for the event. You completely disregard any potential sustainability because you're thinking, I just got to get in shape with that event and then I'll figure it out afterwards. And that never leads to, well, I mean, this goes back to my point.

How we open this is why if someone came to me and they had a date in mind already, they wanted to get on stage and I hadn't worked with them and they said, hey, I want to do the

“show in July 13th, will you train me for that show?”

And I know that's only a few months away. I would say no, no matter what, I was looking at because I don't know where they're at and that doesn't give me a lot of options if I have a time frame on what I think is the most appropriate way to get them in shape. It only leaves you one option, which is to cut calories, increase activity and reduce

reduce reduce reduce and that may not be the most ideal situation where depending on where somebody is at metabolic, where they're at lean body mass wise, where they're at activity wise, all those things come into play before I decide to put somebody into a cut. And so giving me a time frame, I wouldn't even, I wouldn't even take the client. And so this is why this is a terrible strategy for someone to go, hey, I want to get ready

for that run. Or I got the beach in two months and they use that external motivator as the reason why they start a cut and that sets them up for at the very least, even if they have some mild success of reducing some weight or body fat in that short period of time, you're almost guaranteed to put it back on because of the approach that you would eventually get.

Totally.

“So let's talk about a good time to start a cut and we'll talk about how to get to the”

place where it's a good time to start the cut. So number one, you're healthy. What do I mean, people are like, wait, I thought cutting was the way to get healthy. No, listen, if your hormones are off, your sleep is off. You don't have good fitness, don't sit and try to suddenly reduce your calories and

suddenly dramatically increase your activity. In other words, make sure you're healthy enough to go in a calorie deficit. Now this might sound crazy to somebody who's like, I thought the point of cutting my calories

was to get healthy, but here's what ends up happening oftentimes, is people going these

severe restrictions of calories, they were already not very healthy to begin with. They throw exercise on top of it and then they wonder why they burn out. They wonder why the hormones go out of whack. I've had so many people in the gyms that have run women who start losing their hair because of this, you know, guys who's testosterone goes in the floor, can't figure out why there

are libidos. And they might have started out strong, by the way, in the first month, but then afterwards aren't feeling great, so we want to get fit and healthy first before we start the cut. This is one of the things that helps lead to sustainability and success long term. This reminds me so much of being a personal trainer because many times we would get the

client in an unhealthy state because they had already exhausted all the other ways to get and shape themselves before they come higher. At the point they come to you, they've already beat themselves to death, they've already starved themselves calorie-wise, they've already destroyed their home-worm profile and getting terrible sleep and then they come to you and they're like, "I need your help."

And so the first thing I have to do, even though this person may be sitting across from me saying, "Hey, I want to lose 50 pounds. I've tried all these things. This is where I'm at right now. It's like, well, listen, I know that's your goal right now, but actually our first

goal needs to be to get healthy." That's right. Focus needs to be, we need to get your hormones balanced, we need to get you sleeping correctly. We need to get your calories somewhere where you're not in such a deficit, you're deficient

in so many micro-nutrients like that has to be our number one priority or else you'll

never obtain that goal that you want.

That's right. So we're aiming for health and then once we're in that kind of healthy fit place, then we start to cut, obviously success, improves dramatically.

“Next up, this one's one of the most important.”

I want to make sure that your maintenance calories are high enough to cut from, all right. What do I mean by that? Well, I'm going to work on, for lack of a better term, speeding up your metabolism through the process of building muscle, the process of increasing protein intake, oftentimes a process of doing what's called a reverse diet through whole natural foods, or I'm actually having

you eat a little more over time to gain the muscle so that we have a place to cut from. This is, there's this huge kind of belief that, okay, if someone needs to lose 50 pounds, they're probably eating 4,000 calories a day and so we're just going to bring them down to 2000 and lose weight. That's not actually true.

A lot of times people are very seditary, 50 pounds are of a way. I have them tractor food. They're not eating a lot to begin with, you know, we may be playing with 2,100 calories, but it's not good food. They're not active.

They don't have a lot of muscle.

15er calories?

Okay, we get some weight loss, but then we're to go from there versus, let me see if I could build

things up through the process of building muscle, through the process of a slow reverse diet through whole natural foods, improving your health, get your metabolic rate up to 3,000 calories, which is very possible in this particular scenario. Now I can go from 3,000 to 2,500, then to 2,000 eventually and get you that body fat. Get that body fat off your body.

I have runway and I need runway with a cut because if you're, if your metabolic rate is already low, cutting from there, you're going to fail. That's going to be very difficult. This is the most frustrating and difficult one for me to talk about because there's a lot of controversy in our space around the science on this.

And there are a bunch of talking heads on Instagram and YouTube that want to make the argument that a pound of muscle only burns a handful of more calories a day than a pound of fat. So this idea of you adding 10 pounds of muscle on your body, speeding your metabolism up radically is false and it's not true.

“And I think it's a terrible, terrible thing to tell people because I have seen what happens”

when you put 10 pounds of muscle on somebody and the amount of calories day than a day.

And here, why don't you give the example of the person you're working with now is actually one of our coaches. How much lean body mass does she gain and how different are her calories? Well, we're in her activities down. Well, well, I won't be able to give you the lean body mass gain yet until we do the body

fat test. And I will update the listeners when we get the results back and we're out. But I will tell you where we're at. She was weighing 98 pounds when we started and she was eating 2,000 calories. We weigh in right now at 106 and we're eating 2800 calories.

2800 calories. Yeah. We're eating PRs and in the gym with her lifts so you know she's gaining money. And I just, I just increased her to 28 because we were holding steady at 106 at 2700 calories.

You know, we were not gaining anymore weight, but we were holding at that. And so I've continued to do that, right?

“So what I've done is I've bumped her about 100 to 150 calories at a time.”

I wait till I see her weight level off her while then we bump again. And so based off of what we think and also reduced her volume, by the way. So reduced her her volume of training and and and moderated her steps. So I don't I told her I don't want her stepping more than 10,000 steps today. So reduced activity.

So based off of what the talking heads on social media would tell you and the math of, you know, one pounder of muscles only a handful more calories. You know, every pounder she gained was lean body mass, which could very well be, you were wishing in seven pounds. Right.

It should only be an additional what according to the numbers. Right. 100 calories. Right. 150 calories.

Yeah, but somehow we're magically eating six, 700 more calories, six to 700 more calories a day and not putting on any weight on the scale. And so what does that tell you? And again, that's happening right now as we're going through that process. I've done it a hundred plus times with clients before.

And so I've seen it. And so I have a lot of theories on why, why that science that they use doesn't math.

I mean, that's basically taking a piece of muscle and a piece of fat in a lab and testing.

That's right. It testing it. What you're not accounting for is, you know, how much now that she's added, say, and we're just using numbers until I get the actual numbers. Let's say she's added five pounds, okay?

“How much more weight does she have to lift to keep that five pounds?”

How much stronger and intense are her workouts because she has five more pounds of muscle? She's now moving a body around, that's got five more pounds of muscle. So I'm going to act. Yeah. There's more to that farm formula than just that meets the eye and that terrible study

that they tout to try and make people believe that building five or 10 pounds of muscle doesn't make that big of a difference met a ball. No. And it's not even just that out of him because she hurts steps, you're moderating. She's reduced.

She's trained like a lot. We're talking about somebody who was underway and we're trying to get her comfortable with eating more food. Here's a deal. Problems.

So complex. Human metabolism or mammalian metabolism is one of the most complex things we've ever identified in the universe. And your body can become more or less efficient with the same lean body mass. Even if you don't gain a pound, if you simply eat more, change the macronutrient profile,

eat high protein and send this signal to your body to build muscle with the same lean body mass. There's a range of calories that your body will learn how to burn. And that's not even without building muscle. Now you add a little bit of muscle and it's not one to one with the numbers.

And so you're talking about is super reliable. We've done this many, many times. So for somebody listening right now who's like, I want to go on a, I'm, I need to lose

Here's what you want to do.

You want to figure out a way and part of this is reverse dieting, which is slowly increasing your calories, stick to whole natural foods, high protein, lift some weights. You want to set yourself up so that when you cut, you're cutting from a high caloric intake a place that you can cut from.

“Because wherever you end up is right around where you have to stay when you're at your”

target body weight. And you don't want to end up at 1200 calories. Right. Good luck training maintain, you know, your weight loss at 1200. By the way, the biggest loser contestants or great examples of this.

These are people crash dieted, beat the crap out of themselves on these shows, lost tons of weight and they found themselves afterwards in this like impossible to maintain scenario where they had to move like crazy and eat very little. And that's what happens when you don't protect muscle. But if you build muscle, man, it moves things in a very sustainable place.

So good time to start cutting is when your maintenance calories are high enough to cut from. Can I cut from here and still eat them out that feels good? That's a great place. A generic answer to that because that's going to look so different for every body type and

person and how much you like to eat.

“But I've always like to take my client to a place to wear them.”

They look at me and they go out and this is just a lot of food. It's a lot of food. Yeah, I want to keep going. So long as I can until they come back to me that it's like, it's almost like it's effort for them to reach that calorie intake so much.

Then it makes this real easy like, hey, don't push that R, just make sure we have the protein intake. And then the calories naturally fall to this little deficit where they feel comfortable eating and then they see this beautiful, nice weight loss, well, they don't feel like they're restricting any food whatsoever.

Oftentimes eating more calories than when they started while they're in the cut. What a great place to be. That this is the other example that we give the last person that I trained before Karen was most of the wealth, also another beginning competitor and I share the story with her. She was actually very similar calorie intake as where Karen was.

We took, we went all the way up to 2900 almost 3,000 calories. When she hit stage, she was higher than what I got her out.

So she, she was at the Lena she ever been enough to take first place on stage when you are

absolutely, be arguably starving your body to get to eat. And then but able to eat 22, 200 calories, it's just so you can get to this place where you build your core maintenance up to where a cut is somewhere where you feel comfortable

“eating and that's really where you want it and that's how you make sure that somebody”

not only loses the weight but then can maintain it because anybody can go from where they're currently at, cut their food in half, this is what GOP ones are doing by the way. I mean GOP ones, what they're doing so well is it doesn't matter how you eat, whether you eat good or not, you take that GOP one and you all of a sudden have half of the appetite or less and if you give anybody the half of the eating half the calories no matter where

they're at, whether they're cutting from 1500 calories down to 700 calories or 4,000 to 2000 calories, that person is going to lose weight, it's that science, it's going to happen. But then where are you left? Yeah, what do you do though with somebody who went from the person who takes that GOP one that was only eating say 2200 calories and you cut them down to 1,000?

By the way, what the data shows, because their metabolism does adapt, it does slow down and it a big part of the way it does, this is it pairs muscle down. So this is what you see in the data with GOP ones, it's 30 to 40% of the weight that they lose comes from muscle, which is why it's so important if you're going to GOP one to make sure you strength train, eat a high protein diet, don't cut your calories too much.

But again, you want to be in a place where your maintenance calories, the amount of food that is required to maintain your body weight is high enough to where you can cut from and still be in a healthy, comfortable place. And then finally, here's a good time to start, is when you have a good plan, you have a good plan on how to get to the place where it's time to cut, you have a good plan on what the

cut's going to look like, and then you have a good plan on how to come out of the cut.

Without a plan, here's what it looks like, this is what it looks like for most people,

because they don't have a plan. I'm going to really cut my calories, so I'm going to weigh less, I'm going to do tons of exercise, and my goal is to lose 30 pounds. And then first off, very few people make it, but you may be one of the people that makes it, I lose a 30 pounds, then you have no plan to get out of it, your calories will low, you're

working out like crazy, your odds of sustaining that are going to be in the chip, abandoned chip. This is the most popular way that people are using our concierne program. So we don't talk a lot about the Mind Pump Concierne program, but we have a training program where you basically just meet with a trainer once a month.

A Mind Pump trainer once a month. Yes, and so what they do is they're going to set up a set them up on a maps plan, then they customize the workout form, and then they set them up on a nutrition plan, normally for most part, not everybody, but most people, it's helping guide somebody through what is like a reverse diet, and they normally have to set up for the, yeah.

it, and then they're making their adjustments every single month, until they get them

“to a place where it's like, okay, now this is a great place for us to start.”

Cutting from. And just like what I'm going through with Karen, this is how I check in with her. She's doing most of the work. I'm setting her on the plan, and then I see, I get all the check-ins, and then when we meet,

I sit down and go, okay, this is what I want you to do.

I want you to add this many calories, or I want you to add this to the training. And so I just make these micro adjustments, and just remind them they're doing a good job.

“And that's probably the number one way that people have been using the concierne.”

The concierne is an accountability. It's just a nice thing to offload, like my on track or my on track. That's right. Like if you want no guesswork, you want to work with a real good coach, and we know they're good because they work for us, we handpicked them.

You meet with them once a week, excuse me, once a month, they'll figure out the plan for you, they'll coach you through the plan, and every month you meet with them to make

“sure you're on track, and you're all set up, and you've got somebody who knows what”

they're doing, working with you through this, and we're opening it to the public. It's mindpumpconcierge.com, so that's mindpump, C-O-N-C-I-E-R-G-E.com. As long as we have slots available, I'm just going to tell you that until the trader slots are filled up.

Yeah, so go there, and first come first serve, work with a mindpump coach, and get this

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