One of the most important and critical phases of any fat loss
diet, yet also one of the most underrated and underappreciated
phases of any fat loss diet is the primer phase.
This is the diet before the diet.
What I mean by that is what you are doing to prepare your body
and your mind for the diet itself.
And in this episode of the podcast, I'm going to teach you
all about this phase, which again we call the primer phase.
This episode will also be Part 1 of a three-part series covering
all three phases of fat loss that we take our clients through
at Taylor Coaching Method. Phase one being the Primer
phase, which is before the fat loss phase starts and as
designed to optimally prepare you for the fat loss phase
coming up next. We do this so that your body
adapts the way we want it to rather than being stubborn to
the changes we are attempting to make and see.
Phase 2 will be Part 2 of this series and that will cover the
progressive phase, which is where we attack the fat loss
goal itself. And then phase three will be
Part 3 of this series, which is the Prosper phase.
This is where we reverse diet and transition out of the diet
into normal life. If once again avoiding weight
regain. If you've ever felt like your
body doesn't cooperate with you when you attempt to lose weight
or that you've never successfully kept the weight off
after you've lost it, this podcast series is going to help
you tremendously. So TuneIn and get ready to
change the way you do things. The greatest things in life all
start with a challenge. The greatest things in life.
You must accept that everything is hard before it gets easy.
Every, every, every, everything you want in life begins with a
hard path, begins with a first initial phase where we are
preparing for the fat loss diet to come.
There's a few things we're going to cover.
We're going to be trying to accomplish stability of our
hormones. So we're trying to really
optimize our hormonal system, removing any imbalances or
dysfunctions. And we are trying to really get
a good solid baseline for our metabolism, meaning we're not
going to heal our metabolism or reverse diet in a way that's
going to reverse all hormonal adaptations.
But if somebody isn't properly eating and moving and
recovering, they could have some dysfunction here and they might
not have a completely healthy or balanced hormone system or
metabolism. We just want to make sure that
we create a good baseline and we create a good healthy baseline
to begin from. It's kind of like our
foundation, right? And everything we do really
establishes that foundation. Much like when you're building a
house, if you want to build a house that lasts a long time and
has a stable structure, you have to have a solid foundation
because that's what the house is built on.
Well, we don't need to get into the fancy nutrition protocols
and really dive into the aggressive fat loss phases until
we establish that foundation, and that's what we're doing
here. So the first aspect is stabilize
hormones and metabolism. Then we're going to really try
to manage stress and optimize recovery.
We're then going to really focus on developing consistency and
increasing the adherence of the client.
After that, we are going to try to create some kind of
standardization within the diet so that we have an easier time
adjusting the diet for fat loss results.
And last but not least, we have establishing baselines and we're
really just trying to get our baseline metrics that we can
adjust from going into the fat loss phase because if we don't
have metrics to adjust, then what are we really doing here,
right? It's like Agpsi can't get you
where you want to be if I don't have a starting address.
And that starting address are these baselines that we're
trying to track and these metrics we're accumulating
during this primer phase. All right.
So the first aspect that I covered here, stabilizing
hormones, the easiest way for us to understand this without going
into a full hormone lecture is that hormones kind of influence
everything that's going on with our metabolism, right?
We're, we're not going to easily be able to lose fat if we don't
have a healthy hormonal system. And it, it's very much so a,
it's a double edged sword in many ways because on one end, if
we have dysfunctional hormones, then it's going to be hard for
calories in versus calories out to help us lose fat because
hormones impact our metabolism so much.
But on the other side, if we don't optimize calories in
versus calories out, that can negatively impact our hormones
as well. If we get too lean, it can
negatively impact our hormones. If we get too fat, it can
negatively impact our hormones, right?
So we always have this kind of push and pull and we can't be on
either sides of the spectrum. We have to find balance.
And that's why it's important to just be aware of where hormones
are AT. And in this phase of the diet,
this primer phase, we're not trying to create any specific
hormone result. If somebody has a hormone issue
that is a complete different protocol.
What we're trying to do with this stabilizing hormones area
or or aspect of this primer phase is really just make sure
that we're crossing our TS and dotting our IS.
We're checking off all the boxes that we know of that will
positively influence the hormone system so that we can say we've
done everything we can to make sure that they're in a good
stable place with their endocrine system, their hormone
system. An easy way to look at this is
that 90% of our hormone imbalances and dysfunctions can
be solved by better managing stress.
Now, that's not a literal percentage from a study because
there isn't a study that shows this.
However, there are numerous studies that show what does
impact our hormones both positively and negatively.
And the positive ones are when stress is reduced and recovery
is increased. And the negative ones are
showing that when stress is increased and recovery is
decreased, we have worse off hormones, right?
So how do we do this? How do we manage stress to
improve our hormones? It's really simple.
We eat more calories. We're going to get higher
quality and quantity, so more sleep and better sleep.
We're going to manage the life stress better.
And we're going to improve program design within the gym.
And specifically with that, we're going to make sure we're
not overtraining, right? It doesn't always mean you need
to train less because sometimes people's programming is just so
bad that it doesn't allow them to optimally recover between
sets and between days in the gym and weeks training, essentially.
So we can string together training sessions and exercise
sequencing to improve this. But there's also times where
people are just over training, right?
But regardless, we need to improve the training.
And if we eat more, we sleep more and we manage stress
better, as well as maybe train less, we're probably going to
manage hormones much better. However, a lot of those things
don't lead to better results long term, as you know, because
you have to train hard, you have to train often, and sometimes
you have to eat less to lose fat.
But that's why in this phase, we are trying to do this in order
to improve the hormones, not necessarily lose fat.
The other aspect of this hormone area is the metabolism, right?
And your metabolism will improve almost immediately when your
hormones do. The hormone system is going to
negatively impact testosterone, thyroid, it's going to increase
cortisol, which is a stress hormone.
All of these things are going to negatively impact the
metabolism, most likely slow the metabolism down, especially the
thyroid hormone that is like the big driver or the control
system, you could say of the metabolism.
So when somebody has hype, so thyroidism for example, or
Hashimoto's, that's going to slow down the metabolism because
it's a slowing of the thyroid. And when we diet or we're eating
too little or we're having a lot of stress, that is exactly what
can happen. And we don't want to be in that
state going into a diet because the diet is not going to work.
You're already dieted down, you're already slowing the
metabolism down and stressing the thyroid out.
We need to reverse that. So the big thing to understand
here is that we just need to get into maintenance calories in
order to support a healthier metabolism. 1, because eating
more food is going to lead to a faster metabolism.
But 2. When we bring our calories up to
maintenance, and this could be because the client has been off
and on yo-yo dieting before reaching us, or it's because the
person is trying to diet. And through the week they're
great and they're eating low calories, which throughout the
week might drop some weight, but it's also suppressing their
thyroid and metabolism. And then on the weekend they
binge or they go party or they eat way more calories than they
realize and that puts on weight. So, you know, net result by the
end of the week, they don't lose weight, but they are cyclically
negatively impacting their hormones.
So we want to recover this. And part of that means, you
know, in that process, we're going to also improve our
metabolism. And if we look at this here,
eating more calories is the most effective way to directly
increase your metabolism because you know these different
abbreviations, this is a percentages of our total daily
energy expenditure. So that is how many calories we
burn per day. We have eat, EAT, exercise,
activity, thermogenesis. We have TEF which is thermic
effect of food. So that's how many calories you
burn through digestion. And we have NEAT non exercise
activity thermogenesis. This is how many calories we
burn just from involuntary movement, right?
Subconsciously walking and moving.
And the the way I'm moving my hands as I talk right now is, is
part of NEAT. And then we have BMR, our basal
metabolic rate, which is just how many calories it requires,
you know, for me to just sit here and not say a word, how
many calories does that require? My body requires calories to
just survive. That's your BMR, right?
And so knowing this well, if we look at EAT exercise activity
thermogenesis, if we eat more, we're going to train better,
we're train harder, we're going to be more muscle.
That's going to increase our TEF is thermic effective food,
meaning the more food we eat, the more calories we burn
because more calories are being burned through thermic effective
food. And then our NEAT, our non
exercise activity thermogenesis, that is going to improve as
well. So we're going to actually walk
more, we're going to talk more, move more, our hand gestures are
going to be more standing more, all these things that we do
throughout the day that burn calories through movement, that
is non exercise activity. I'm not intentionally exercising
right now, but I am moving and that requires calories.
Those increase and there's a lot of research to prove this.
In fact, there's even research to show if you eat the majority
of your calories in the morning, so you have a large bowl of
calories for breakfast, let's say that's your biggest meal of
the day. You are going to have a higher
NEAT and a faster metabolism throughout the day.
There's a lot of good research on what's called chrono
nutrition and it's time restricted feeding in a in a
specific way. Instead of fasting in the
morning, they're placing their biggest meal in the morning and
stopping earlier in the day. But what they also found is that
eating more calories in the morning led to a higher energy
expenditure per day, which meant a higher maintenance caloric
intake per person, which is obvious.
You eat more, you have more energy, you move more.
But this is exactly why during this primer phase, we want to
capitalize on these aspects so that we can improve the
metabolism, we can get more movement, better training, and
actually eat more food, which allows us to start the diet from
a better position. The next aspect of the primer
phase that we are trying to really get a benefit from is
stress, right? Managing stress and optimizing
recovery. And I've already kind of alluded
to, you know, eating more food and sleeping more in these
things are going to help our hormones, help our get better,
have a better metabolism and also have a better ability to
manage stress and recover. But how do we actually do some
of this right? So first we need to eat more.
We've said that next, I would recommend increasing carbs and
protein. Carbs are going to help reduce
course all. Course, all is a stress hormone
and they have an inverse relationship.
Insulin, the hormone insulin has an inverse relationship with
cortisol. So when we eat carbs, insulin
does spike up and a lot of people are afraid of this.
This is not a bad thing. In fact, insulin is a, a
essentially an energy utilization hormone.
It helps us store energy for better use.
And if you're training hard, you need that because it's going to
help you store carbohydrates as as muscle glycogen to train
harder and build muscle. But when insulin goes up,
cortisol goes down. So a really good way to manage
cortisol, the stress hormone, is to actually eat carbs because
it's going to help reduce and blunt down that cortisol
response. So we want more carbs.
We also want more protein because that's going to improve
recovery from training and overall reduce physical stress.
As most people know, we want to increase sleep quality and
quantity. Quantity, I would suggest 7 plus
hours per night. This is going to help avoid
having low inhibition and low stress capacity.
So research shows the less hours of sleep you get, the more
likely it is that you're not going to be able to handle
stressors very well. And it's also going to have a
negative impact on your inhibition.
Inhibition is your ability to make good decisions.
So example, drink alcohol, you're going to have lowered
inhibition, make bad decisions when you're drunk.
Very obvious, right? Well, when we're sleep deprived
and stressed out, we also have a lowered inhibition.
And that bad decision might just be falling off your diet.
So we want to manage stress and we want to get enough sleep to
make sure that we have better inhibition skills and we can
make better decisions for the diet.
And improving sleep quality is also going to help increase
growth hormone levels, which is going to be a big driver of
muscle and recovery. This is going to help us build
muscle tissue. It's going to improve mental
focus and it's going to increase strength performance quite
literally instantly, because if you get better sleep tonight,
tomorrow you are going to train harder in the gym.
And there's research to show that.
And all of these things can happen from literally getting
just one extra hour a night. So if somebody's getting 5:00 to
6:00 on average, we want to get them six to seven on average.
But overall, what we're trying to do is really just improve our
state of mind and our well-being because this is directly going
to improve our motivation and enthusiasm for the fat loss
phase. So as we manage stress and
recovery, we are just getting more mentally ready to dive into
the diet and that enthusiasm and motivation to diet is going to
pay dividends when the client steps into a fat loss phase.
The next benefit here is developing consistency and
increasing adherence. So really what we're trying to
do here is put all of our, you know, spend some time forming
new habits because that's going to be crucial for any diet,
whether you're a seasoned Dieter and it's just a new way of
dieting. You got to form a new habit that
way or you've never died it before and this is all fresh to
you. Either way, we are going to be
forming new habits, whether it's the way we diet or it's the diet
itself. And habits are way easier to
form, especially new ones or difficult ones that challenge
your current lifestyle routine in in current habits and
systems. Those are way easier to develop
when you're at maintenance, when you're in a deficit, you're
stressed and you're tired and you don't want to necessarily
acquire new habits and try hard and challenge yourself even if
it's necessary. However, when we're at
maintenance and we're in a good state of recovery and stress
management, it is much easier to form new habits.
And we want to capitalize on that aspect during this primer
phase. This is also a chance for people
to get used to the tracking systems being used.
So for us, we are tracking different aspects.
For some clients it's tracking macros, for some clients it's
tracking habits. But for almost all clients, it
is tracking something. We're going to track weight,
we're going to track measurements and progress in the
gym. We are going to track
biofeedback. And, and some of these things
are daily, Some of them for people are it's only weekly.
No matter what, there's going to be metrics that need to be
tracked because that is part of how you adjust to lead to more
fat loss in the future. But not only that, again, going
back to the GPS analogy, I cannot get you where you want to
be if I don't know where at you're at right now and I need
those starting number. So what we're doing is getting
used to tracking. And as a coach, we're gathering
data about the client that we can further adjust.
And part of this is we're also going to see the
inconsistencies, is each individual going into a phallus
phase is going to be better at different things.
They're going to be worse at different things.
Different things are going to be harder for different
individuals. And I want to see those
inconsistencies and understand what I'm going to have to lean
into and work on most with each person.
And throughout this whole process, the communication
between the client and the coach is obviously going to improve.
And that's really, really crucial when going into a fat
loss phase. Standardizing the diet is a big
piece of this as well. And this is going to kind of
accumulate as we've gone on because, you know, if you're
going to make an adjustment to a diet that's inaccurate, you
can't accurately predict what that adjustment is going to do,
right? If somebody is very consistent
and I know exactly what they're doing with their diet, I'm going
to make an adjustment and I can almost guarantee what the result
is going to be because I know exactly what they're doing.
So for fat loss, this is both very effective and very
efficient because if we standardize the diet, we can
make something staples that don't change too often, which
makes it the planning easier for the, the client or the the the
individual going to the fat loss phase.
It also creates standardized metrics or numbers or visuals
that we can adjust from. This standardization even
applies to before and after pictures.
If you're taking a before picture or a progress picture in
a different setting on a different day at a different
time, with different lighting every single time, you cannot
compare week to week, month to month.
But if you take it every Saturday at 7:00 AM with the
same lighting after the bathroom, against the same wall,
with the same camera, it is going to be very easy to see
that you either are or you are not making progress.
And if you are not, we can then go to the standardized diet and
know exactly what to tweak in order to progress that forward.
So what we're really trying to do with a standardized diet is
just make sure we have certain aspects in place that can be
adjusted, whether that is calories and macros, or it's the
measurements in the progress photos, or it's a literal meal
plan. Because maybe some people do
better with eating the same things six out of seven days a
week. No matter what.
We want a system around these things that is standardized,
that can be adjusted in the future.
And towards the tail end of this primer phase, we begin to
develop this standardization. And then lastly, we are going to
establish these baselines. So now that we've done all this
work, we have tracked, we have formed habits, we have improved
tracking metrics and looking at different biofeedback markers.
We're taking progress photos and measurements.
We're building communication with the individual that is
going through the fat loss phase.
We have baselines that we are going to set as standards to
follow. And then future adjustments will
happen from these are going to be things like steps, the
training volume or the training split and program you're on any
programmed cardio potentially, which would be untracked steps.
We don't want to track steps from cardio if it is intentional
cardio because your step count should be more reflective of
your non exercise activity, so not planned out activity, Total
calories in macros, food groups should be mostly Whole Foods,
meal timing, frequency, sleep schedule, supplements.
Like all these things factor in of like what is the baseline of
what is normal so that we can start the fat loss phase with
this normality and adjust from them.
And in summary, this, you know, what is this primer phase in
kind of conclusion? So you can kind of take the
Cliff notes and, and understand why it's so important what a
primer phase really is just a short period of time to prime
the body and develop consistency.
We are forming habits, we are developing consistency,
improving adherence, and we are priming the body
psychologically, physically and physiologically.
So internally, mentally and physically, the body is getting
more recovered and prepared for the diet.
And the main purpose is really just that is to develop that
consistency and have a baseline to then adjust from so that the
fat loss phase goes way more effectively and efficiently.
It's easier for the client to adhere to and they are going to
be more enthusiastic and motivated by it because the
results are also going to be effective quicker.
You're going to see progress faster because your body is
ready to adapt to the diet you put them in.
And how long should this be? You know, if you're an advanced
Dieter, you can sometimes get away with not doing it, but
typically an advanced Dieter, somebody who has died in
numerous times and maybe they've already checked off some of
these boxes before starting, They're going to be looking at
one to two weeks. You know, it's a short period of
time to just kind of create some standardization and baselines
before going into it. Intermediate Dieter sometimes
could get away with one week, but many times we're seeing all
the way up to four weeks. And then a beginner Dieter is
going to be around 2 to six weeks.
You know, one or two, as you can see, is the minimum for just
about anybody. And then 6 is probably as far as
you should go. If you're six weeks in and you
haven't been able to establish all these things from a primer
phase, you need a deeper intervention for the coaching
and it shouldn't be preparing for a fat loss phase anymore.
You should just be focusing on good nutrition at that point.
And again, we want to avoid skipping this at all costs, but
there are times where individuals have checked these
boxes prior to approaching us, and in those cases, there might
be a case for skipping this. What's next is the progressive
phase. So we'll save this for the next
video, but essentially the next video is going to be about how
to go through the diet itself, creating an actual timeline,
creating the actual deficit, adjusting that diet along the
way, and potentially implementing cardio so that you
can further that progressive phase by getting leaner and
leaner as the progressive phase goes on.