My friend sent me a recent DEXA scan report and was distraught about his body composition score.

This is a lifelong athlete—excuse me—super-athlete, who has performed at the highest level in his sport for decades. After being sidelined by surgery, and perhaps some less scrutinized dietary choices, he drifted outside his familiar performance zone into the softy zone.

If we all consistently deployed our vast knowledge to our lifestyle habits, we would all be kicking ass all the time. That’s not so easy, so we are often compelled to try and correct course. Sometimes, driven, focused, highly competitive types will get the urge to take desperate measures: “That’s it! It’s time for exhaustive workouts and prolonged fasting!” It’s also becoming a popular theme where “calorie deficit” is the end-all. This insight might be true in a vacuum, but we have to think about real-life variables, such as hormone optimization (especially for women), lifestyle factors including access to nutritious foods, psychological issues relating to food, the difficulty is accurately counting calories burned, the difficulty in accurately assessing what your body does with ingested calories, and so forth.

If you want to lose excess body fat, know that while it is a complex challenge, it is actually completely possible to accomplish if you follow a sensible approach. In this episode, you will hear the five tips I suggested to my friend to get things headed in the right direction. If you or someone you know wants to lose weight, this show will put you on the right track and help you lose excess body fat in a healthy way.

TIMESTAMPS:

What are we to do when we drift from being a solidly built athlete into the softy zone? [00:47]

First, we have to acknowledge that we probably haven’t been using all the knowledge we have about good nutrition. [01:56]

Extreme diet restriction and grueling exercise habits are not the best way to go. [03:08]

We want to have a healthy psychological relationship with food. [05:45]

We need to pay special attention to visceral fat accumulation. [07:23]

One thing to try is fasting.  This gets you away from access to calories for a certain period of time. [10:26]

You can try restricting certain macronutrients. And eliminate processed foods. [15:17]

If you overconsume processed sugar, you will store it as fat. However, sugar itself is burned for energy. [18:00]

Eliminate overly stressful exercise patterns. [19:23]

To really get the best benefits for reducing excess body fat and for overall fitness breakthroughs, you must introduce brief, explosive, high intensity strength workouts and sprint workouts. [23:23]

LINKS:

• Brad Kearns.com
• Brad’s Shopping page
• B.rad Whey Protein Isolate Superfuel – The Best Protein on The Planet! Available in Two Delicious Flavors: Vanilla Bean and Cocoa Bean
• NEW: B.rad Superfruits – Organic Freeze-Dried Exotic Fruit Powder! Natural Electrolyte Hydration & Energy Powder
• Two Meals a Day
• Dark Calories
• Podcast with Dr. Cate Shanahan
• Carnivore Score Food Ranking Chart
• Born to Walk
• Keeping up with the Ingebrigstens
• Brad Podcast about Ingebrigsten
• Lion Martinez Sprinting Podcast
• Podcast with Dr. McGuff

LISTEN:

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TRANSCRIPT:

Brad (00:00):
Welcome to the B.rad podcast, where we explore ways to pursue peak performance with passion throughout life without taking ourselves too seriously. I’m Brad Kearns, New York Times bestselling author, former number three world-ranked professional triathlete and Guinness World Record Masters athlete. I connect with experts in diet, fitness, and personal growth, and deliver short breather shows where you get simple, actionable tips to improve your life right away. Let’s explore beyond the hype, hacks, shortcuts, and sciencey talk to laugh, have fun and appreciate the journey. It’s time to B.rad.

Brad (00:38):
Visceral fat is actually categorized as a separate organ in the body because it has the ability to secrete agents into the bloodstream. Just like your…

Brad (00:47):
My friend sent me his DEXA scan report, and he was distraught about his body composition score. It was outside of his performance range, and this guy is a lifelong athlete, a super athlete who’s performed at the highest level of his sport for decades, very fit specimen. And then in recent times, he was sidelined by a serious injury for many months. Perhaps made some less scrutinized dietary choices and drifted into he had all kinds of harsh terminology to describe his present physique. We’ll just call it, drifting into the softy zone. And, he reached out for help and discussion. And, I thought, you know, for someone with that nice fitness background and vast knowledge of healthy eating and adherence to really, really high dietary quality standards, so we’re not talking about an average Joe off the street. We’re talking about a peak performer that had let things go a little bit.

Brad (01:56):
I think we can turn this around quickly. So I wanted to make a show and give you the five tips that I gave him to take action immediately. First we have to acknowledge that if we simply all deployed our vast knowledge of healthy eating and lifestyle habits, all of us would have six packs kicking ass all the time. It wouldn’t be any trouble with all the disastrous modern influences, such as the highly processed foods and the penchant for, relaxation, convenience, luxury, indulgence, rather than a healthy, active, energetic lifestyle. But that’s not so easy. So sometimes it’s,, or often it’s the case that we need to increase awareness, add some more discipline and focus and correct course when things go off track a little bit. Now, I’ve also noticed that the jock types, the discipline-focus type a people who have a background of fitness or competitive athletics will often have this tendency to take an extreme approach.

Brad (03:08):
So it’s like, that’s it. I gotta get this weight off right now, so I’m going to embark upon extreme dietary restriction combined with very intense and grueling exercise habits and get the job done. That is probably not the optimal approach. Can have a lot of, uh, fallout repercussions and, uh, negative emotions a accordingly where you might even let yourself go further in some examples or become exhausted hormone dysregulated and thereby experience a setback and, uh, a rebound effect where, uh, you put the, uh, whatever weight you lose right back on. So we wanna do it, uh, correctly and get into some, uh, strategy here where it’s not gonna be a torture, a torturous bootcamp experience, but rather just a recalibration and some fine tuning and some focus to indeed work hard to get the excess body fat off and then get back to a comfortable baseline that’s sustainable indefinitely in the future.

Brad (04:19):
So we don’t wanna do the extreme approach, um, and we also don’t want to buy into these commonly uttered sound bites these days that it’s super simple and it’s just all about eating fewer calories then you burn, and all these things that have been strongly disproven by emerging science. So it’s a very complex issue. The calories that we eat are difficult to measure. They have different effects in the body. It’s not even worth counting them because of those first two statements I made. But what’s really worth it is to take a few steps back and make sure that you clean up your diet before you even consider trying to lose excess body fat. And that’s a great message from Dr. Tommy Wood, my former podcast guest, where he says, we’re not even gonna talk about dropping excess body fat until you get your health status optimal and everything’s working well.

Brad (05:17):
And now we can embark on the challenge. So, get healthy first in every way. And I’m talking about psychologically healthy, stress balanced. Um, you’ve cleaned up the nutrient deficient, heavily processed foods that you’re consuming, which interfere with your body’s ability to burn calories efficiently and thereby will set you up for failure when you try to when you aspire to drop excess body fat.

Brad (05:45):
We want to have a healthy psychological relationship with food. So if you’re feeling negative or frustrated about your current situation, um, let’s try to drift over into a position of gratitude. Hey, I’m healthy. I’m here, I’m enthusiastic, and I’m interested in taking some action to drop some excess body fat. Um, so here, uh, with, here are the, uh, the five tips. Uh, first I’d like to point out, if you’re an active, energetic person that has a fitness background, you can safely lose one pound of fat per week, which is a lot and makes a big difference in a short time.

Brad (06:19):
We’re so used to seeing the flyer stapled to the telephone pole lose 20 pounds in six weeks. And those extreme, uh, cases of changing your number on the scale quickly are largely due to glycogen levels, water retention, inflammation, um, losing both muscle mass and body fat. And you add it all up. And yes, indeed, you can lose 10 pounds in a week. Uh, Nick Simmons has a YouTube video where he lost, uh, 10 pounds in a single day, 24 hours. And so water retention and glycogen retention, uh, varies, uh, substantially just from, uh, recent eating or exercise habits. Exercise in the hot weather, ride your stationary bike in the sauna, you can lose five pounds in an hour, um, starve yourself for 24 hours. You can lose a couple few more pounds. And that’s the effects that we want to just disregard and look into actually dropping body fat, especially visceral fat.

Brad (07:23):
So we wanna pay special attention to the fat that collects around the abdomen, because it’s metabolically different than the subcutaneous fat that collects in the other popular storage areas around the body, like the rear end, the thighs. And, the abdomen will collect subcutaneous fat as well. That’s the squishy soft fat underneath the skin. But the visceral fat is what creates that firmness and en largeness around the waist circumference. And this stuff is bad news because it’s an indication of overly stressful and unhealthy lifestyle practices that are causing hormone dysregulation and disturbance to metabolism. So we gotta get that visceral fat off the body so that your hormones can optimize and your energy, and that is especially effective when you clean up your diet to, uh, attack that metabolically unhealthy fat. Visceral fat is actually categorized as a separate organ in the body because it has the ability to secrete agents into the bloodstream just like your thyroid or your adrenal gland.

Brad (08:24):
In the case of visceral fat, it secrete secretes, uh, very health destructive inflammatory cytokines, and these can prompt aromatization of testosterone into estrogen, which can prompt the accumulation of more visceral fat. So it’s a slippery slope downhill when you add a bit of spare tire, which is so common happening over the years and decades of life. A little spare tire begets the accumulation of a, a bigger spare tire. So we want to, uh, first clean up the diet. And then secondly visceral fat is highly associated with overly stressful lifestyle habits, chronically excessive cortisol production, and that’s the other part of getting your life’s stress, in order. And that includes, in many cases in the fitness scene, people with overly stressful exercise patterns will add belly fat, even if they’re training for the marathon, because they’re producing so much cortisol and driving the accumulation of this especially health destructive kind of fat.

Brad (09:31):
So you can lose a pound a week safely. You want to get, you can go get, you know, pay a few bucks and get a DEXA scan and realize what your body fat percentage is. But the easy way to do this is like, pick a tight pair of pants around the waist and try ’em on. And then over time, as they fit better, you can realize that you’re making progress with the number one priority, which is to drop visceral fat. And, way more important than seeing the changing numbers on the scale, because again, extreme dieting, extreme exercise will cause that glycogen depletion, less water retention, three grams of of water binds with every gram of stored glycogen. So you can see how it’s easy to lose five pounds with a single depleting workout, and that’s gonna be something that you can also gain back with a couple good meals and sitting around, uh, at, you know, on vacation in Las Vegas for the weekend.

Brad (10:26):
So let’s focus on visceral fat first, and then if you have a desire to drop overall excess body fat, subcutaneous fat, that can happen with, um, uh, a great, uh, precision and predictability if you, uh, make the right changes, uh, in your lifestyle. Now to get it off, you can do some things that might be considered extreme or temporary, and one of ’em is fasting. So what fasting does is it gets you away from, uh, access to calories for a a certain period of time. If you’re gonna fast until 12, noon is part of your protocol, um, you will most likely consume fewer calories throughout the day, but not, uh, not reliably. Uh, it’s easy to fast and then binge and overeat for the ensuing hours if you’re, uh, not healthy when you start in with a practice like fasting or, uh, a calorie cutting or cutting carbs or whatever you’re doing.

Brad (11:25):
So we wanna make sure that end result is there and sustainable. And if you can comfortably fast until 12 noon and then enjoy a typical meal and a typical evening meal, that can be an effective strategy, even if it’s just for a short time as you aspire to get this excess body fat off. That’s why we have a great book. Uh, you can find out on Amazon called Two Meals a Day from Mark Sisson and I and we’re just talking about moving the whole framework of this flawed and dated three square meals a day that started from, uh, the industrial age where we were heading off to the factory. So we needed breakfast in the morning. We certainly needed a break from hard toil on the farm or in the factory at midday. And then of course, after a busy active physical day, you’re gonna be hungry in the evening.

Brad (12:11):
Right now we’re a little different where we’re looking at screens and not moving much. So we can conceive of, you know, a different routine where we’re not obligated to sit down and have three meals a day. Hey, you can also have six small meals a day like the bodybuilders have done for decades, and getting that body fat down to single digit percentage. So, um, I don’t want you to get too hung up on what is the best protocol for me. What’s the one that science recommends because I think we’ve gone too far down that road, rather than looking at personal preference and setting yourself up for success with your own personal lifestyle habits. And so maybe your two meals a day are breakfast and dinner, or breakfast and lunch, or lunch and dinner. It doesn’t matter. It’s what works best for you.

Brad (12:59):
And if, if six small meals work best for you and you feel better and more energized and more sustained, that’s great. So, um, when we go crazy with extreme, uh, calorie restriction or prolonged fasting, it’s very possible to turn off some of these desirable adaptive hormones like testosterone like thyroid function, because the body, uh, reacts very sensitively to perception of being starved or being deprived of calories. And basically what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna slow down key, uh, metabolic and hormonal functions as a response to perceived starvation. So, going too far down the road of fasting or cutting your typical calor intake by, uh, too significant of an amount will cause you to slow down. It’ll take longer to recover from workouts. You might experience symptoms like loss of libido and signs that you’re, uh, pushing it too far and overdoing it.

Brad (13:55):
So what we wanna do is kind of dance below the radar where we feel satisfied and nourished, maybe at times, allowing hunger to kick in a little bit and understand what it feels like to dance on that line of, you know, getting just enough food. You need to feel satisfied. Maybe you feel a, a bit of hunger kicking in at 11:00 AM ’cause you’re fasting until 12 noon, then you sit down to a nutritious meal, but you don’t wanna struggle, suffer and starve your way to fat reduction. Because as anyone who’s watched the Biggest Loser show or had personal experience of doing something extreme, and at first they lost 20 pounds in six weeks because of glycogen depletion, less water retention, less cellular inflammation, less muscle mass, and of course, some reduction in body fat, has a great propensity to add it back.

Brad (14:46):
So play around with fasting. Maybe you do it one day a week, and then you kick back into a normal meal pattern where you’re eating nutritious meals and feeling satisfied, but just paying more attention and awareness to, of course, get out of that category of chronic overconsumption of calories, especially processed calories and not moving enough throughout everyday life. So, number one is the idea that you can, you can lose around a pound of fat per week if you do it right.

Brad (15:17):
Number two is that you can engage with restrictive strategies like fasting or restricting certain macronutrients in the interest of naturally defaulting to a lower caloric intake without disturbing metabolic or hormonal function. The big one here, number three, is to clean up your diet and eliminate processed foods. And the big three, as Mark Sisson and I talk about in a lot of books, are refined grains, sugars, and industrial seed oils with a special focus these days on the latter, the industrial seed oils.

Brad (15:52):
Uh, listen to my show with Dr. Cate Shanahan and her recent book launch in 2024 Dark Calories, where she talks about just how bad these seed oils are for your metabolism. They’re now seen as the main culprit in the development of insulin resistance, diabetes, obesity, and in short, they interfere with your body’s ability to burn energy efficiently to burn stored body fat, namely,. They also prompt the release of endotoxins called lipopolysaccharide into the bloodstream because of the chemical and preservatives and process nature of the food. This can prompt leaky gut syndrome and, and chronic inflammation and basically set you up for failure and continued accumulation of excess body fat, especially visceral fat because you’re eating, um, really unhealthy, uh, chemically altered nutrient deficient food. So simply trending over to consuming natural nutrient dense foods. You can go on my website, bradkearns.com and download the Carnivore Scores Food Rankings Chart, print it out.

Brad (16:56):
This nice colorful printout goes on your refrigerator, and you can navigate toward the most nutrient dense foods in the world and try to emphasize those in your diet. Things like grass fed sustainably sourced, uh, red meat, oily cold water, fish, uh, pasture raised eggs, fresh fruit, appropriately chosen, uh, vegetables and other carbohydrates that you can digest easily. And you’re, you’re, uh, organizing your, your diet around these nutritious foods and feeling totally satisfied and nourished so that your body can feel energetic and alive and get the proper exercise in and the proper daily movement. So, cleaning up your act and going into your pantry refrigerator and throwing out anything that’s containing these seed oils or process ingredients. And we’re also hearing about how sugar is toxic to the body and addictive and all these things. And I wanna point out like sugar itself which is converted into glucose, all forms of carbohydrate, whether complex or simple, are ingested and then converted into the glucose and burned in the bloodstream.

Brad (18:00):
Now, if you overconsume sugar, you will then store it as fat and, uh, prompt an undesirable insulin response and put yourself on a rollercoaster of needing more processed food, quick energy calories to get through the day. So certainly consuming processed sugars, with all the other things that come with that. Usually chemicals, preservatives, processed fats and so forth is gonna set you down the wrong path. But sugar itself is burned for energy, unlike the refined high polyunsaturated industrial seed oil, which is difficult to burn for energy and, and, more likely to be stored and cause metabolic disturbance. So it’s the over consumption of nutrient deficient processed sugar that is causing the big problem, not the dried fruit that I nibble on my way to the running track so that I don’t have digestive, uh, stress, but I do get some energy before my workout and after my workout, before I have my body’s able to sit down and enjoy a regular meal. And that’s just a little side comment because we’re hearing all these soundbites, but definitely the soundbite about cutting out those seed oils and all the processed foods made with them, that will be a big boost in your overall metabolic function.

Brad (19:23):
Now, number four is to eliminate stressful, overly stressful exercise patterns. Yes, you’re burning a lot of calories when you head out there and run long distance at an elevated heart rate, or when you’re going to CrossFit, uh, five days a week and pushing your body really hard for an hour at the various exercises they have you doing. But when you engage in a pattern of exhausting depleting workouts, this will make you both hungry and lazy in the aftermath and send the genetic signals to store fat and shed muscle, which will make it further difficult to actually get the physique that you want.

Brad (20:07):
So, overly stressful exercise patterns trigger these starvation mechanisms and survival mechanisms in the body, especially when it comes to the familiar example of endurance runners. And that’s why, Mark Sisson and I, our new book, Born to Walk, is talking about how valuable it is to reject the flawed and dated notions of the running boom and slow down to a walk and make walking the centerpiece of your healthy actor active, energetic fit lifestyle. Because walking, walking is less strenuous, whereby you are emphasizing fat burning instead of sugar burning. That happens when your heart rate drifts into those medium to difficult intensity zones, as is the typical approach for the vast majority of endurance runners out there. So you’re sending the genetic signals to signals to store fat because the prompting of endurance day after day after day, as you accumulate weekly mileage, your body needs fat to make it through those long workouts, and then it needs to inhale sugar in the aftermath because you have depleted your muscles of muscle glycogen, and you’ve also depleted your brain and your willpower by suffering to the extreme, uh, during your workout pattern.

Brad (21:23):
So it’s not just about calories burned, helping you drop excess body fat. And I had long conversation with my friend who’s a longtime endurance athlete, and used to associating, Hey, if I put in more weekly mileage, I get leaner and look better. And that’s a snapshot notion taken away without a full appreciation for the big picture where if you stress yourself too much, you will actually be less likely to drop excess body fat. Instead, what happens is you put in those mileage, you put in those, uh, miles and your nice morning run, and then in the evening you become a Ben and Jerry’s machine where you have that strong appetite and that strong drive to consume excess calories, especially indulgent sweetss and treats because you are in a depleted state. So frequently, and I talk about this often, and we’re gonna detail this in the book tremendously, if you look at the example of the elite athletes training at the highest level, the swimmers winning the gold medals in the Olympics, or the endurance athletes are circling the track or running the marathon in record speeds.

Brad (22:33):
They are training well within their capacity of virtually all the time at all their workouts. There’s a big article in the New York Times about Jakob Ingebrigsten, I think the title was Keeping Up with The Ingebrestens We’ll put that in the show notes. But Jakob described how he never exceeds 87% capacity, uh, during his workouts. So he’s always keeping something in the tank and saving it for race day. I did a whole breather show with that title, so you can enjoy that one too. But the main takeaway point is to train within your capacity. You don’t wanna push yourself to exhaustion in the name of losing excess body fat or in the attempt to get fit, because that will just cause rebound and regression and overeating. No apologies to Ben and Jerry’s ’cause guess what? They actually put vegetable oil in many of their products.

Brad (23:23):
Couldn’t believe it when I look at the labels in the store. So that’s the number four was avoid, uh, overly stressful exercise patterns. And then number five, to really get the best benefits for reducing excess body fat and for overall fitness breakthroughs, you must introduce brief, explosive, high intensity strength workouts and sprint workouts. This sends the opposite genetic signal that is to shed excess body fat and gain muscle sprinting is by far the best return on investment for fat reduction because the penalty for carrying excess body fat while sprinting is so severe. And of course, I’m talking mainly about sprinting on flat ground, where you get that penalty for carrying excess weight because you’re going so fast. But of course, uh, high intensity sprinting on low or no impact options are also very profound genetic signaling to drop excess body fat.

Brad (24:19):
In contrast, endurance running or anything endurance related is not gonna have that strong genetic signal to drop excess body fat because the penalty is not as strong. And that’s why you see 30% of the marathon field outside the healthy BMI. So they’re shuffling along at a slow pace and carrying quite a lot of excess body fat in many cases because there’s no penalty. It’s just you’re going that slow. You have enough fat to burn for the marathon, and you’re not sending that, that shock signal to your genes, especially as we get into the older age groups. And we have a more difficult time altering our body composition, my friend’s my age around 60. So it’s time to shock the body with some very challenging, very short duration, uh, sprint workouts and strength training sessions. So, I have shows dedicated to the protocol for sprinting.

Brad (25:10):
My off repeated basic template is to conduct four to eight sprints lasting between 10 and 20 seconds with a rest interval of around six to one, uh, for to the work ratio. So if you do a ten second sprint, you take a leisurely rest interval of at least a minute, and real sprinters will rest for a lot longer than that. My former podcast guest and world champion Sprinter Lion Martinez, talks about, uh, resting for, uh, a minute for every 10 meters that you sprint. So you can think about that, but that’s really for the true sprinters. And I think the average person, whether it’s on a stationary bike, whether it’s sprinting up a stadium stairs or up a steep hill, or doing the assault bike or doing the rowing machine, you can sprint on just about anything, but go hard for a short time and then rest for a long time so that each sprint can be consistent quality to the first one and the second one.

Brad (26:03):
And again, four to eight is plenty. And you’re sending a powerful genetic signal to your body without exhausting yourself when you do 20 sprints lasting 30 seconds each or something that drifts back into the overly stressful exercise patterns I talked about in the previous number four,. You want to avoid exhausting the body with your workouts and rather teaching your body to perform brief explosive movement. The same thing with strength training where you want these strength training sessions in the gym or at home or whatever apparatus you use. You can use your own body weight. You can use stretch tubing, simple devices, mini bands, or of course go through the proper protocol at the gym. I’m a big fan of the Dr. Doug McGuff Big five workout that he talked about at length during our podcast interview, where you go in and do five major, uh, large muscle group compound movements.

Brad (27:01):
They are the overhead press, the chest, press the lap, pull down the seated row and the leg press. And so you’re working these big muscle groups in the body, and you’re doing a single set to failure. And the whole entire workout takes only around 12 minutes to complete. It’s very, very challenging. Dr. McGuff states and his co-author John Little state you only need to do it once a week, research proven to help improve and make strength gains, uh, because the workout is so challenging. And, that, that 12 minutes a week that you dedicate to a proper strength training session can have a huge impact on your overall metabolism and attempts to drop excess body fat. What happens after you do an explosive brief duration, high intensity workout is this, uh, concept called EPOC kicks in that stands for excess post-exercise oxygen consumption. So as your body recalibrates back to homeostasis and starts repairing and replenishing muscle glycogen and lowering body temperature and respiration and blood pressure and heart rate, and all these things that the body kicks into gear after the workout in order to stimulate the fitness adaptation.

Brad (28:09):
Right, that’s how the body works. You work the muscle hard, you breathe hard, and then you rest and refuel and the body comes back stronger. But this requires a lot of energy to recover from a true high intensity session. Even a short duration session will boost your metabolism, especially your fat metabolism for 48 hours afterward or even longer. So that is the true secret to fat reduction. It’s not counting your calories in your little chart or your app and then going out there and running one more mile, so you can burn another X amount of calories and, and, you know, get to your number for the day. It’s pushing your body hard and then sitting back and while you sit and while you sleep and while you rest. And calorie burning and fat burning is turbocharged. This is why you will never see a fat sprinter.

Brad (28:58):
And I attended the Olympic trials in June in Eugene, Oregon, had a fantastic time watching America’s greatest athletes vie for a chance to qualify for the Paris Olympics. And I counted the number of fat sprinters I saw, and the answer was zero. So, these guys and gals are sending the appropriate genetic signaling to get universally lean and ripped. And yes, of course, the elite endurance athletes who are running high speed and, and trying to make the Olympic team are also lean and ripped. But when I look at the recreational population of devoted endurance athletes who are putting in hours and hours of training week in, week out with numerous goals, one to complete the wonderful marathon that they signed up for, but also to get a lean attractive athletic physique, um, it’s simply not working. It’s been a dismal failure that’s lasted for decades.

Brad (29:50):
And we’re calling it out with great aggression in the book Born to Walk, because it simply doesn’t work. So you want to take it easy, establish a baseline of frequent low level activity, uh, mainly in the form of walking, and then anything else you’d like to do that’s ust ordinary low stress, not strenuous movement, but then throw in, uh, those brief explosive, high intensity workouts to prompt the proper genetic signaling for fat reduction. So, quick summary. The first one is to realize that you can lose a pound a week if you get focused and, um, you know, dabble on the edge of hunger and, uh, optimal caloric intake rather than excess caloric intake. That means not buying some of the stuff that you might usually buy that you enjoy as an indulgent treat. ’cause right now you’re trying to get focused on dropping some excess body fat.

Brad (30:40):
So it’s gonna take a little work and restraint and restriction and discipline. Uh, number two is you can do some fasting and some dietary restriction, but don’t overdo it. So, you know, dabble in and out fast for one, one day a week for 24 hours, or you know, meet those time restricted feeding windows if you like. You wanna start eating from, uh, not before 12 noon, maybe do that, uh, five days a week if it’s something new for you, or four or three. And then the other four you go back to normal so you dip in and out of, uh, this sort of, uh, deprivation because you don’t want to overdo it. Number three is, the main one is to eliminate nutrient deficient processed foods that interfere with your body’s ability to burn fat internally. Otherwise, you have no chance at dropping excess body fat.

Brad (31:25):
And that especially goes for the health destructive, visceral fat, that’s a sign of hormone dysregulation and adverse eating and lifestyle practices. Number four is do everything you can to avoid overly stressful exercise patterns that will send the genetic signals to store fat, shed muscle and be in an overly stressful state, especially when you, uh, combine it with all the other stress factors in your life. And then number five, instead of that overly stressful grind and all the weekly mileage you get good at doing brief, explosive, high intensity strength training and sprinting sessions that have by far the best return on investment for fat reduction and overall fitness competency, there is the magic. Go out there and do it. Comment if you would love to hear about your success with fat reduction when you’re talking about your exercise and dietary changes. And thank you for emailing podcast@bradventures.com. We’ll consider those, maybe talk about ’em on a future show. But those are your marching orders right now. Go get it done. And that’s a wrap.

Brad (32:34):
Thank you so much for listening to the B.rad Podcast. We appreciate all feedback and suggestions. Email podcast@bradventures.com and visit bradkearns.com to download five free eBooks and learn some great long cuts to a longer life. How to optimize testosterone naturally, become a dark chocolate connoisseur and transition to a barefoot and minimalist shoe lifestyle.