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January Mistakes to Avoid - Part 1
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Transcript
Introduction to Health Mistakes Series
00:00:01
Christian Yordanov
Happy new year. New year, new you, right? Well, in this mini series of the podcast, I'm going to go over some of the major January mistakes that people make that actually worsen their health when their intention was to improve their health,
Why Cutting Calories is a Mistake
00:00:23
Christian Yordanov
right? So today we're gonna talk about mistake number one, and that is cutting calories, right?
00:00:32
Christian Yordanov
you may have eaten a little bit too much over the Christmas period and maybe you have indulged in some stuff that was less than savory, maybe had a few extra drinks here and there and now you feel a little bit heavy, maybe a bit bloated, maybe you know the scale says you're a few pounds heavier than you were maybe at the start of December or mid-November before Thanksgiving started and whatnot. So you have the good intention that you you know you want to improve some, you want to feel better, you want to look better. And you have your intentions are good. most people I believe most pretty much all people, when they set out to do these things in the new year, their intentions are good.
00:01:22
Christian Yordanov
The problem is the methods that they have been taught are very suboptimal. right And today I'm just briefly going to discuss why starting a diet in the new year, and when I say diet, I mean cutting calories, right? You might, let's say, you might say, I'm going to aim for 1700, 1800 calories a day. Or if you're, you know, on the bigger side of things, you might say, okay, I'm going to try to eat 2000 calories, right? And again, the intention is good, but what's the problem with just suddenly cutting calories all of a sudden? Well,
00:02:02
Christian Yordanov
The first thing is it's a horrible process. Right? Dieting sucks. If dieting didn't suck, everybody that was overweight or they felt they were overweight would have dieted down to the weight they want to be at. And there you go. and end of End of story. And the whole dieting industry which is worth billions and billions wouldn't exist. The problem is diets don't work because they suck. It sucks to not eat enough food or to to it sucks to reduce calories significantly, like let's say five, six, 800 calories a day. That is just
00:02:47
Christian Yordanov
and we'll help Actually, let let me kind of briefly explain
Body's Response to Calorie Deficits
00:02:50
Christian Yordanov
why it sucks. well when you Let's say that' say your full metabolic rate with with activity, with you know exercise, thermogenesis, with thermic effect of food, everything all together, let's say that was 2500 calories. And let's say you decide you gonna cut down thats you're going to cut calories roughly a day.
00:03:14
Christian Yordanov
Well, where does that deficit, how does ah ah that deficit get made up is the question. And the simple answer is,
00:03:25
Christian Yordanov
You make up the deficit. Your body makes up the deficit. So you will start to burn some of your fat mass and you will start to burn some of your lean tissue. And that includes things that you can't see. So we know muscle as lean tissue, but it goes way beyond muscle. You have your organs, your bones, they have a lot of protein in terms of collagen that can be turned into glucose and various other things. Your organs, your there is lean tissue all over the body, right? Your joints, the collagenous tissue that makes those up, you know cartilage tendons. You also have
00:04:12
Christian Yordanov
your blood vessels, your you know your arteries and so on, they have these sort of collagen matrices. So there is a lot of ah tissue in your body that can be broken down to make up that energy deficit that you have imposed on yourself through the dieting process.
00:04:31
Christian Yordanov
but what What facilitates that energy deficit to be made up? Well, as I've kind of talked about on the podcast before, as I have covered in my book in decent detail, that energy deficit is made up yeah or to make up that energy deficit, that' that's a process that's facilitated by the stress hormones. So you're very likely your cortisol will be elevated very quickly after you start dieting within
00:05:07
Christian Yordanov
the first day really. Your adrenaline is likely to increase. Various other stress hormones are going to increase as well. you know Glucagon, norepinephrine, serotonin, stuff like that.
00:05:20
Christian Yordanov
and Well, what's wrong with that? Well, these are degenerative hormones when elevated for a prolonged period of time, right? So the the trick, unfortunately, with a diet is you can't diet for a week and get decent results. You have to diet for sometimes multiple weeks, multiple months in order to get that that's result. So it feels like crap because the degenerative hormones are degenerating your body
00:05:50
Christian Yordanov
And yeah, of course of course, you're not going to feel very nice dieting. That's why people can't sleep. They're more snappy, more irritable. this is i I believe this is such a big mistake to start the year off like that because you're gonna you're actually going to make yourself less healthy through this degenerat degenerative process of breaking down your body to make up this energy deficit that you have imposed by cutting calories.
00:06:17
Christian Yordanov
right it's It's going to lead to cravings. And deal as you may know, the unfortunate thing about cravings is when you give in to the craving, it's often a binge, right? You're gonna have a whole pizza.
00:06:36
Christian Yordanov
or a whole bag of Doritos and some donuts or whatever whatever your your favorite fix is. Personally, I'm a pizza guy. I can eat a lot of pizza. I can put away a ton of pizza, right? And I've noticed, like we because it's a bit of a tradition to go to this nice Italian place that friends of ours run, and I know I can eat a pizza and be well satiated.
00:07:05
Christian Yordanov
and If we go and I haven't eaten well in the morning time, I am ravenous by the time we get to the pizza place for lunch on a Sunday.
Personal Experiences with Overeating
00:07:16
Christian Yordanov
And we always like, my wife can never finish a whole pizza, so we could take it home if I'm a reasonable human being, or I can eat like half of her pizza on top of mine. And then we forget for my daughter, who's three years old, so she had like a crust or two max, we don't work.
00:07:33
Christian Yordanov
don't like shove it down her throat. So that pizza is either getting taken home or I can obliterate it at the pizza place, right? And if I haven't eaten, have if I haven't had a decent breakfast in the morning, sufficient, I will obliterate a lot of pizza and then I will feel a little bit uncomfortable later, right? But that I know I am like that, right? This is kind of my my weakness, right? Is I like to eat and whatnot. And if I starve myself, I am going to then overeat. And lot I know a lot of people are like that because I talk to a lot of people that, you know, weight is one of the goals that we are working on with a lot of my clients and they have similar troubles as myself.
00:08:23
Christian Yordanov
So the trick in January is not to go on a diet and start cutting calories in order to lose the weight. I know you can get quick results with dieting but at the cost of what? So we've already covered you're gonna feel like crap because of the cortisol and the adrenaline. and It's gonna interfere with your sleep. It could interfere with your relationships, right? It could mess with your mental performance because let's say, you know, yeah your cortisol is elevated, right? If you cave in to a craving, what will happen is the the food that you just ingested, that will lower your cortisol, you know, the insulin would increase, the cortisol will will lower their seesaw.
00:09:10
Christian Yordanov
so But then what will happen is because the cortisol and the stress hormones and the adrenaline has been sort of helping you run your body, when they're lowered, you actually very likely to feel lethargic, you feel crappy, right? Because it's kind of an adjustment and it's a sucky adjustment to go from amped up on on cortisol and adrenaline to suddenly being sort of you know those hormones being lower then but you still haven't you know replenished your liver glycogen you haven't uh your body is not like in full-on burning fuel mode so that adjustment what why do some people get
00:09:53
Christian Yordanov
sleepy in the afternoon is because you know they have a lunch, a big lunch, it lowers their cortisol and adrenaline, their stress hormones, and then that they they get sleepy and lethargic and tired ah ah because they were running on stress hormones up to that point.
Effects of Dieting on Metabolism and Weight
00:10:08
Christian Yordanov
So those are some things, but I think the more insidious thing is the degenerative aspect because as you know, or as you may know,
00:10:19
Christian Yordanov
when a person loses weight in somewhat an ideal scenario you're going to lose still 20 up to 30 percent of that weight will be lean mass and that's bad because first of all you didn't want to lose the lean mass that was degenerated by the stress hormones right you had no choice in the matter the stress hormones degenerated your lean mass especially the cortisol release a lot of that lean tissue is metabolically active muscles and organs they're very metabolically active so losing that lean mass is in part wide dieting cutting calories lowers your metabolism metabolism right
00:11:08
Christian Yordanov
what What happens is then you are actually burning quote-unquote fewer calories. So if you were to then go back to the old diet or to let's say cave into so some binges or you know laps from the diet for a couple of weeks, you will very quickly lose your gains or in in this game in this case you will lose your losses.
00:11:32
Christian Yordanov
you will regain your losses. You will screw yourself. you were Your progress will be halted and reversed but but very likely. The problem is further exacerbated because of your lowered metabolic rate, because of sort of the messed up satiety signals and the messed up craving sort of doom loop. You may actually overeat for more than just a day or two, and because you've lowered your metabolic rate, you've lowered your metabolically active tissue, you are likely to regain more fat than last than the last time.
00:12:09
Christian Yordanov
so on top So you've degenerated your body. You felt like crap this entire time. Maybe you were snappy with people around you. I know why I would be like, if I'm not eating enough, I'm definitely more irritable, cranky. but I was always a high cortisol person. you know It took me years to figure out how to lower the stress hormones and keep them low so I can actually like be. So people can be around me without hating me, basically. I wanted to kill me type thing.
00:12:41
Christian Yordanov
So you really, if you were to take my advice, you are real it would behoove you to spare yourself that all that effort and and pain and suffering. And here's what I would do
Focus on Real Food for Health
00:12:59
Christian Yordanov
instead. I know it's not as sexy. The gains or the losses of body mass are not as quick, but you would be much better off if you just really cleaned up your diet, right? Because we know it's not like over the new year, it's not like we just, for the most part, most people aren't just overeating high very high quality food, right? It's actually very difficult to consistently
00:13:28
Christian Yordanov
overeat very high quality food, like organic, whole food, you know, a single ingredient type stuff, no processed garbage. It's very difficult to eat that, to overeat that for a long time. It is still possible if you kind of do the wrong macro ratios and stuff like that, but it's a lot harder. So what I would actually do Before cutting calories before thinking about cutting calories is start you know eating real food a ideally organically sourced.
00:14:02
Christian Yordanov
And do that do that for all of January, if you can, at least if you're not already. And if you are, think about where could you could you improve the cleanliness of your food. So if you're buying if you going to the restaurants, often that's not clean food for the most part. Most places it's just... The risks are way, way, way too high that your food will have so the wrong types of oils and various other non-organic things and pesticides. that's not That's not clean food, even though it might be like vegetables and and you know a meat.
00:14:40
Christian Yordanov
It's not going to be organic in most cases. You know, if you get eggs from a restaurant, are they, are they buying organic pastured eggs? Very few places are right. So yeah if you're getting takeout or prepared meals, that is a huge opportunity to clean up the diet. And so there's a couple of benefits here. First of all, less sort of first of all, less pesticides and toxins and chemicals. right So that's that's a good thing because what those things do is they can only mess with the metabolism. they they're not They're not going to magically improve the the workings of your body. right Then you have less chance for seed oils and various omega-6 type fats to make it in your food. If you don't buy stuff from that's packaged, prepared, be that you know in a salad bar,
00:15:36
Christian Yordanov
a deli, a deli, a cafe, a takeout place, restaurant. the The more of these types of meals prepared be prepared and processed meals you eat, the more likely you're going to get a few grams of pollen saturated fats here, a few grams of, you know, poufas there, oils, soybean, safflower, God knows what, sunflower oils. And these things, not only do they add up calorically speaking, they are also the omega-6 fats, they lowered the metabolism. right That's why a squirrel that wants to hibernate is going to munch a lot of k nuts and stuff because they facilitate that process of hibernation. They lower the temperature, they antagonize thyroid hormone,
00:16:25
Christian Yordanov
And they just kind of have this pro-hibernation effect by lowering you know the temperature and the metabolism. So that's what being exposed to a lot of these foods does. It actually slows down your metabolism because you have a lot of these fats also on your body. So if you clean up your diet,
00:16:43
Christian Yordanov
Let's say your one resolution for the new year is I'm going to clean up my diet. I'm only going to eat whole foods that were organically grown pastured and or wild caught. Right. And I will only eat real food. That's going to have a huge, huge impact. Right. So that's kind of what I
Impact of Inflammatory Foods
00:17:06
Christian Yordanov
would do. with The other thing is I would eat less inflammatory foods. And this This again goes back to the process stuff. The the more processed junk and chemicals something has, the more likely it's going to be inflammatory for your body. Now we go a few steps further with my clients is we we run a test where the it's a food sensitivity test, but there's only one lab that does this in in the world, in the US, and they take your blood and they expose your blood to the various
00:17:39
Christian Yordanov
not just foods, common foods, but also even some chemicals that are found in the food supply. So they then measure the immune reaction to the food that your blood at that given moment in time released, right? There's a bunch of stuff that gets released by the blood, prostaglandin, histamine, serotonin, and a few other things.
00:18:01
Christian Yordanov
and They measure how much of that is released and the more obviously the more that's released the more inflammatory that food is for you right now that would change over time and the trick is the way we do this we get the the inflammatory stuff out of the diet super inflammatory stuff and then the less inflammatory stuff.
00:18:20
Christian Yordanov
There's still a spectrum there so we actually remove the somewhat more inflammatory in in the more safer spectrum of foods. We remove them from one to four months and then kind of reintroduce them and that really gives the body a lot of Just a huge break in terms of gut inflammation, immune reactivity. Had one client, she lost, a bunch like she lost like I think, six or eight pounds that first weekend where she started eating according to the diet plan you know in terms of removing all the inflammatory stuff. And she just like continued doing it fairly strictly ah with the occasional indulgence here and there. It's not a big deal. And she just kept like seeing improvements
00:19:06
Christian Yordanov
throughout this and this is what this is what what ah most clients report. it's It's kind of a nebulous type thing. You can't really feel if you were 20% less inflamed the next day or after a week. It's hard to really feel it unless you were super hyper inflammatory in terms of the foods you're eating. But over time, these kind of small little changes, reductions, inflammation, they have a lot of benefits. And this can reduce water retention, for for example, the inflammation that can also cause water retention. It can also just help you sleep. Your gut function will improve. So if you can't do a test like that,
00:19:46
Christian Yordanov
At least, like I said, just focus on the cleanest real food that you can get, pastured, grass fed, organic. And the thing about it is because that food is generally a bit more expensive, not always, but it's usually a little bit more expensive, it's harder to then indulge in garbage. Like, I mean,
00:20:11
Christian Yordanov
any anything from Nestle or like Kinder Bueno or all of this garbage, I would never even dream of buying that for my daughter, for example. Not not necessarily because it's expensive. A lot of this garbage is fairly cheap, but we have a certain you know budget constraints for the food we're going to buy. So I would prefer to just buy the staples, right you know your meat and animal products and you know basic vegetables and fruits.
00:20:38
Christian Yordanov
And I would rather spend that money there than have the super very diet and eat out and, know, eat these delicious sort of like ah ah prepared meals and stuff where I know I'm getting a ton of extra garbage with, you know, there's all these strings attached to all of these meals and these cheap, you know, Snickers and all this garbage. So if you could just remove the donuts and the the pastries all of these like little things here and there that you indulge in that oh it's just one thing and it's just oh it's just another thing on yolo this yolo that if you just do that just eat real food you're gonna see a lot of benefits in terms of not just weight I would say weight will come it might not come super quickly but how you feel right and when you feel better about yourself a lot of things are going to improve
00:21:30
Christian Yordanov
Okay, so you're going to start making better decisions. You're going to have these, you so you will feel good, so you you have more energy to do more of the things you want to do, more of these healthy, positive behaviors. So it it you you know once you do that, once you start eating cleaner and getting less poison basically in your body,
00:21:53
Christian Yordanov
A lot of beneficial things happen not just for your body but for your mind, for like for your life. this i don't think To me it's not just about losing the weight so that you don't feel like garbage about yourself. To me it feels really good because you are getting healthier, because you're getting healthier.
00:22:14
Christian Yordanov
And then a lot of good things will happen because when you're healthy and when your body and mind are in a healthier state, you make better decisions about yourself, right? And you actually, you can reach a level where you want to do good for others, right? You feel so good about yourself that you have en energy to spare, to give to your community, to your family, to whatever, whatever the case may be, or to express your creativity. I know I'm getting a little bit sort of every fairy here, but woo, but I really think this is it.
Rethinking New Year Resolutions
00:22:41
Christian Yordanov
And problem ah ah the that with most what most people do in the beginning of the year, they just have built up this sort of almost dread, existential dread about how like, okay, I drank too much and maybe I ate too much and made too much crap and
00:23:00
Christian Yordanov
blah, blah, blah, that they wanna make a big sort of thing, a big effort in the new year to kind of absolve themselves and kind get to like a baseline to reset some some of it or claw back some of the the naughtiness, let's say, let's let's use that term. The problem is if you do what most people do,
00:23:25
Christian Yordanov
in the new year, new meet, January, but new year resolution, bullshit sort of thing, is at the end of it, your are you the question is, at the end of it, are you going to be healthier or are you going to be less healthy? And I honestly believe that most people that just cut calories and diet start dieting down, they're actually getting less healthy. They might be losing weight, but health is not how lean or not lean you are, right?
Comprehensive View of Health
00:23:57
Christian Yordanov
Health health is a much more complex thing. Health is not how fit you are.
00:24:02
Christian Yordanov
but It's much more complex than how fit and lean a person is. right Health has to do with like your hormonal a sex hormone milieu, your stress hormones, your neurotransmitters, you in terms of toxicity, the detoxification. How are you sleeping?
00:24:23
Christian Yordanov
right Your transmitter balance. There's just so many things so many aspects of health that are actually worsened by the most common mistakes that people make in January, including cutting calories. Because here's the other thing, is when you cut calories, you're eating less food, so you're likely getting less nutrition. And most people out there, they have pretty deficient diets. If you actually try, this is something you can do in the new year actually, I think would be positive, is if you track your diet,
00:24:58
Christian Yordanov
Just track your diet and for a week or two, see what you're eating, how many grams, blah, blah, blah. It doesn't take that long. While you're reading, you can do that. You can see, are you even meeting the ah RDAs for the vitamins and minerals? you know and Remember, these RDAs are bullshit. Just because you meet them doesn't mean you're going to be healthy or optimally healthy. But the point is that most people aren't even meeting the RDA for all of their vitamins and minerals.
00:25:31
Christian Yordanov
they're woefully inadequate in terms of their diet. So if you actually cut calories down, you're further worsening any potential nutrient gaps that you have, and then you're degenerating your body with cortisol.
00:25:47
Christian Yordanov
right So again, this is what I this is what i kind of i want to emphasize. If you were to make a change to your diet, don't start with eating less. Yes, some of us, for sure,
00:26:02
Christian Yordanov
overeat over the Christmas period and eating a little bit less would be a good idea. But instead of eating the same stuff we normally eat and eating less, invest in yourself, right? Invest in your long-term health by buying higher quality food, right? And see how you feel eating the cleanest food that you can afford this time.
00:26:26
Christian Yordanov
I absolutely am sure you will feel better eating cleaner and again because there's less when it comes to organic pastured grass-fed certified organic there's less of a there's less choice of junk food you are more constricted and even even the the junk food for example like sometimes I get the I will have these jelly babies or whatever, jelly kajiggers. So I have them in my...
00:26:57
Christian Yordanov
in my tennis bag. So if if my blood sugar is ever dropping, I know I can kind of call on them if I need a snack just to kind of keep keep me together. But ah the the big reason they're there is if I'm going to like a tennis lesson with my daughter and she's like not letting me get through my lesson, she's demanding stuff. It's kind of like my ace up the sleeve to give myself, you know, the half hour to finish my lesson. and without her sort of having a meltdown. I want to go home. I want to do this. you know So I've only used that once, but the I am a lot less concerned. The point here is I'm a lot less concerned about
00:27:39
Christian Yordanov
giving her certified organic jelly beans because, you know, it has gelatin, has some glucose fructose syrup, it will have sugar and whatever, but and it it will have these colors from food like, you know, from beetroot. And so it's not obviously it's not an ideal food.
00:27:54
Christian Yordanov
Right. But it's a lot better than the the stuff with the the fake or the artificial flavors and colors and aspartame and all the other garbage that you get from the conventional grocery stores. like Likewise, cookies and stuff like sometimes, you know, if you have guests over or get like cookies and maybe some gluten free, but maybe some with gluten. And at the end of the day, a lot of these things, they might have like chocolate.
00:28:21
Christian Yordanov
organic wheat flour maybe organic sugar so at least the individual ingredients you know there is a they're less likely to have garbage and herbicides and pesticides. and then There's less potential for super toxic ingredients to be in there and emulsifiers and whatever.
00:28:36
Christian Yordanov
So even if you eat junk food, if it's organic, you are a lot better off. I'm not saying to do that. I'm saying just start with the real food. But then if you want to indulge, here's the thing. If you want to indulge, right? If you want to have a ah ah pizza, you're a hell of a lot better buying and ah ah like a pizza from the organic store, and you know, well have organic ingredients, eating that to satisfy or, you know, to indulge yourself in, then whatever is, you know, from Domino's or in in the frozen food section of your conventional grocery store, stuff like that. So, again, to hammer the the point home.
00:29:23
Christian Yordanov
If you're going to change something about your diet in the new year, make it make your diet clean as clean as possible for a start. And then you will see yourself that it's so difficult to overeat and consistently overeat too much to where you're going to be gaining, you know, all this weight or whatever. When you're eating real food, it's just so satiating. Like if you have a simple example, you know, if you have a steak, so you have a ribeye.
00:29:56
Christian Yordanov
and you have some some white rice on the side or you have some eggs and you know whatever. like How much of that can you eat in a day? You're gonna have a meal, you're gonna be satiated for a few hours, you're gonna have another real meal, you know steak, potatoes, whatever, and you will like chicken, fried rice, whatever. You will feel satiated where you won't feel like you need to, you know,
00:30:24
Christian Yordanov
eat all this very calorie dense foods. you know So do that and a lot of inflammation, a lot of stuff is going to improve for you. And i I have seen it plenty of times when people clean up their diet, a byproduct is healthy weight loss without cutting calories.
00:30:46
Christian Yordanov
and you know starvation diets and low carb or you know intermittent fasting or fasting and all this nonsense that is so actually so degenerative to the body because of all the stress hormones that get released. you know So that's mistake number one to avoid In the next episode, I'm going to discuss another one that a lot of people sort of fall into that trap and it just hurts them more than it actually benefits them. So stay tuned for that and I'll see you in the next episode.