How to Lose Weight on a GLP-1 and Keep Your Muscle | Mind Pump 2987

As of the recording of this podcast, one out of 10 Americans This is on a GLP and that number is growing rapidly. In fact, for the first time in recorded history, the obesity epidemic is actually declining. So these medications are very powerful and they definitely work. However, they don't come without caveats. One of them being muscle loss. So today's episode, we're gonna talk about how you can lose weight on a GLP and keep your muscle. Let's get to it. That's the main goal. And I want to start, because this is top of mind for me, because I had this conversation this weekend. And the answer, all the answers that we're going to give, not one of them is RETA. Because that's, just so you know, that's being marketed because what you just said is because of how large this is. Now, obviously there's some people that were going to go over this stuff and that maybe they didn't know this maybe, but I'd say a good percentage of people that have been around GLP-1s now or been on one long enough, they've heard that you can lose muscle. Uh, and the way that Retatrutide is being marketed is as this one, that's like this, the miracle one and all of them that you don't lose muscle. Retatrutide or Retatrutide, depending on how you want to pronounce it. Yes. So, uh, it, it went through phase three trial. So as of the recording of this episode, it's not FDA approved yet, but it probably will be. And it did cause a little bit more weight loss than the generation two tirzepatide or one, uh, you know, semaglutide. Uh, but no, it also caused, you also saw muscle loss, uh, in the trials. So I do want to be clear I hear that GLP... Peptides or medications don't cause muscle loss. So it's not that the GLPs themselves have this deleterious effect on muscle. That's not what's happening. What's happening is that GLPs, one of the main ways, because they're quite complex. But I'm going to simplify it here. The majority of what's happening on a GLP that is causing the weight loss is the fact that it severely limits your appetite. Yeah. Okay. So when you go on a GLP, and if you're on one now, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You suddenly don't think about food like you did before, or you eat less overall. You're just not eating as much. And so you start to lose weight. And it's predictable. This is predictable. Anytime you dramatically cut your calories, And you bring them down below what you're burning, okay, which causes weight loss. This is what causes weight loss. I'm eating less calories than my body's burning. So how's that possible? How's my body able to burn more calories than I'm taking in? Well, it borrows or uses calories from stored energy, right, from body fat. So that causes the weight loss. But what my body does in response to that is it tries to learn how to burn less calories because less calories are coming in. So it's no different. It's similar to a person who suddenly is making half as much money at their job. So if this is you and suddenly your paycheck got cut in half, well, one thing you would do is you would try to cut your spending in half. It would be irresponsible to continue to spend as much money as you do now if suddenly you're making half as much money. Well, if you're not careful, it's really easy to crash diet. It makes the process easier. And so it's no different than just extremely restricting and limiting calorie consumption. It just, it's one of those things that doesn't, it takes away a bit of that noise and that edge as far as cravings are concerned. Right, and so what your body does is it says, okay. We're now taking in less calories than we were before and we're burning and we're using stored energy, which we don't want to do. So let's burn less calories. And one of the ways it does this is it pares muscle down. So it's not that your body's burning muscle for energy. That's not quite what's happening. What's happening is your body is pairing muscle down to reduce your metabolic rate. And so what you see in the data consistently, you don't believe me, you can pause this episode, look it up yourself. The weight loss that you see with GLPs looks like about 30, depending on the study, 30 to 40% of the weight is lean body mass, meaning the rest of the weight is body fat, but everything else that's being lost is non-body fat weight, which they refer to as lean body mass. Now this includes water, glycogen, and muscle. Okay. So why do we want to stop that? That I guess would be the next thing. Like somebody's like, well, I need to lose 50 pounds. Who cares? Right. If 30 to 40% of that is muscle, why would anybody want to stop? muscle loss. Let's talk about that first before we can talk about Well, I mean, it's metabolically advantageous It protects our bones. It's what makes you strong and functional in the real world. There's so many benefits. I forget, we can't not include aesthetically. You look way better, way better with more muscle than less muscle. And so There's a lot of reasons why we don't want that to happen. But the most common one, because the person who is like really obese doesn't really probably think about those things. They just want to get all this body fat off. Is it really sets you up for a tough place to live forever? Because you get, if you, let's say you take somebody who has got a hundred pounds to lose and they just don't care. They just, by all means, means necessary, crush the appetite with the GLP-1 and let it fall off. They find themselves, and we get, by the way, we've helped and coached so many of these people. I mean, we took a trial group last year, over 50 people in that group that we did personally. All the three of us coached them through. We've got probably hundreds of clients that we've taken through. Almost all of them inevitably end up hitting a hard plateau where they're eating very little calories. And their body learned how to burn those little calories. And they're still not where they want to be. Right. They end up to at a place where they, maybe they lost that initial 50 pretty fast. And then they lost maybe another 20 cause they went even lower. And now they're at this place where they're like, uh, I'm eating 1300 calories. I'm walking all these steps and I still got 20 more pounds. What am I going to do up my dose and eat even less? Remember we had a woman in the group where she lost 60 pounds, had another 25 or 30 to go. So she had started from a high place. She was eating around 1,000 calories a day. Yeah. And she was stuck. And she was moving too. She was moving and she was stuck. She was stuck at this body weight for three months. So she had plateaued so hard because her body pared muscle down and learned how to burn less calories. Just adapted. So that's one reason. The other reason is fragility. So here's what happened. So people who are overweight don't have more muscle. ...than people who are normal weight. There's this myth out there that you carry more muscle mass. You actually don't. Yeah, it's a big misconception. And so you're going to lose all this weight and lose muscle mass, which you really shouldn't lose anyway because you don't have a lot to spare. And bone density. Bone density gets worse, and you increase your risk of injury, your loss of mobility, loss of energy. Just doesn't feel good. So yeah, okay, cool. You went from obese now to fragile. In fact, this is happening at such a rate that this is what people are talking about. There are clients, there are people in their 30s and 40s who lost weight through GLP, didn't do anything to try to keep the muscle. They just want to lose weight. Ended up with osteopenia as a result. A lot more cases are coming out like that. That's right. So what you want to do, the best strategy, here's the deal. Okay, I'm going to also be very clear. In my lifetime, there has not been a non-surgical medical intervention that comes anywhere close to the power of a GLP. Nothing comes as close as you can get. to a miracle drug, but it must be used properly. And if you use it properly and you do the things we're going to say and you're consistent with them to keep the muscle, you will get miraculous results. It can be very beneficial for you. That's right. If you just use the GLP and rely on the appetite suppression alone and change nothing else and just eat low calories. You are robbing Peter to pay Paul. You will end up with another issue, which is having low mobility, having fatigue, and a metabolism that's just crawling. And so keeping muscle is the name of the game when you're on a GLP. I do want to share, too, how this can creep on you and you not realize it. But if you... This is especially for the audience that hasn't listened to this podcast for a long time. Um, cause it's been now, has it been two years since I did my thing? I think so. It's been two years. I think, I think two years ago was when I tested the GLP one. And the idea for those that don't know was, uh, obviously they were getting super popular. I'm like, I want to take this thing. I want to take the medical dose that they, that they prescribe. I don't want to use my trainer brain. What I mean by that is all the things we're going to teach you right now, I'm going to just go how I feel. You're just going to use it like the typical person who just takes it. Yes. And then just see what happens. And just see what happens. Eat when I'm hungry, train when I feel motivated to train, and just go about my life, right? And let it take its course. It was totally an experimental thing. And really the idea behind that was it would help me be a better coach to communicate this. I found a lot of things out that were really fascinating going through this. One, how incredibly easy it was to eat nothing. It was so easy to not eat any food at all and how crazy amount of weight I lost. I look back actually just because I just got a DEXA scan again so I could see back what my old number was. I came all the way down to 199 pounds. I typically carry myself at 225 to 230. You lost over 30 pounds. Yeah, over 30 pounds. And a large percentage of that was muscle for me. So in fact, I think mine was 20 something pounds of those 30 pounds was muscle. So, but what I found interesting was it wasn't until we actually had to, we had to do these photos that we did for a new marketing material. And it just so happened to be, you know, the team needed it when we were, I was in the middle of this, whatever. We took them, didn't really think much about it. It wasn't until after the whole thing was said and done. And I looked at the pictures That I could see myself differently than I did in the moment. So in the moment, even I was like, oh, I'm losing body fat. I'm getting smaller. I'm leaner. It's like, you know what? I know I can get it all back. It's not a big deal. Didn't, I actually didn't mind the way I looked because it was like that perception drift. It was like, oh, my cheeks are starting to lean out. And you weren't really working out a lot. So it's not like you could totally tell how much strength or I remember because your energy was low. Oh yeah. Yeah. I had a really hard time. Strength training consistently. Your calories are so low. Because my energy was really, really low. There's many, if you go back, you can listen. A lot of times I had to choose between, am I going to help my wife out around the house or get a MAPS 15 workout in? And it was like one or the other, because I didn't have the energy to do both. But I say this because there might be somebody who's listening right now who doesn't think it's a problem or don't think that it's that big of a deal because they probably saw themselves as the fat kid or the fat person for so long and just seeing the weight come down is so positive and so much better than it was. And I share that because it might not be until you look back and you look at the picture and you go like, oh my God, I didn't look really healthy. And so... I didn't see that until I saw the pictures. Like I knew what was happening. Obviously I was tracking whatever and I felt the energy, all those things you're saying. But I was like, and we joke about it, tongue in cheek in here, but I get the whole Ozempic face because I had that. It looked, it didn't look good. It looked, it looks different than how I look right now. Like I'm leaner now today than I was on that. But I've got significantly more muscle on me and I'm healthier. I'm eating a lot of meals. And so it's a very different look, but hard to see when you're in it. So I just wanted to share that because I know there's gonna be people listening to this that are on a GLP-1 that may not be taking all the advice you're about to give right now and still doesn't care because they're like, I'm not- They're happy they lost the weight. Yeah, I'm not fat. I'm not fat as I was a month ago. So who cares? And I want to encourage people, if you do what we're about to say, While on a GLP, it's plausible, it's likely you won't lose any muscle, and in some cases... You may actually build a little bit of muscle while on a GLP. So you can totally stop the muscle loss with what we're about to say right now. Also, I'm going to add this piece right here. If you do what we're about to say, combine it with some behavioral modification, meaning you're actually trying to change how you eat and change things while on a GLP. You also set yourself up for a potential future where you don't have to live on a GLP for the rest of your life. This episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Element tea. Element. So this is an electrolyte powder that you can add to your water. They also have them in ready-to-drink cans of sparkling, and they give you the electrolyte your body needs to perform. By the way, Element's one of the first companies to give you the right amount of sodium. So most electrolyte powders don't have nearly as much sodium as you need. If you actually need electrolytes, you need the sodium. Well, with Element, it's a thousand milligrams. So if you're on a low carb diet, if you eat only whole foods, if you sweat a lot, work out hard, you might notice some of the effects of dehydration or not having enough electrolytes, things like fatigue or headaches or muscle cramps. Well, when you supplement with Element, you notice within 15 minutes if this is what you need. So I love it because I can feel it. I get better pumps in my workouts. It tastes great. By the way, no artificial sweeteners, no sugar. It tastes great. And again, it's got what your body needs. Go through our link and get yourself a free sample pack of their most popular drink mix flavors with any purchase. Go to drinkelementtea.com. Mind Pump. By the way, tomorrow at 4 p.m. Pacific on Instagram Live, we are giving away Rho Creatine to six winners. Go see if you won. Also. Right now, the biggest sale of the year, 60% off all MAPS workout programs, all bundles, all mods, all guides, everything's 60% off. Go to mapsfitnessproducts.com, use the code BLACKFRIDAY for the discount. By the way, every purchase enters you to win something all month long. We have red light panels, squat racks, vacations, supplements, merchandise. We're giving away all kinds of stuff. Every purchase enters you to win. And again, everything's 60% off. It's mapsfitnessproducts.com, the code BLACKFRIDAY. We'll see you there. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show up by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com. I'm talking right now. Hit pause. Head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. Okay, let's get into now, how do we keep the muscles? Start with number one, which is eat a high-protein diet. Okay, so the data on this is really, really clear. We've got lots of data, lots of studies on this. When we compare restricted calorie diets, all things being equal, one of them being high protein, one of them being normal protein, the higher protein diet results in more fat loss and less muscle loss. Okay, that's always the way it is across the board. The question always arises, what is high protein? Okay, high protein is close to about a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. Okay, so if your target body weight is 150 pounds, that's what you're aiming for. If your target body weight is 180 pounds, That's what you're aiming for. If your target body weight is 120 pounds, that is what you're aiming for and you want to eat it consistently day in and day out. Now, one thing I want to add to this is this is hard to do when you're not on a GLP. This is hard to do when your appetite isn't restricted because of a GLP because protein is very satiety producing. Eating 150 grams of protein a day for the average person whose target body weight is 150 pounds Is hard. You throw a GLP on top of that and you're choking it down. So there are some strategies that you can do with this. And I'll give you two of them. One, start with a high protein breakfast. Don't get behind the eight ball. You wait till noon to start eating your protein. Good luck hitting your targets. So that's number one. So eat a high protein breakfast right when you get up. Number two, protein shakes can help a lot. And in many cases, when people are on a GLP, especially in the beginning stages where your appetite's really restricted, you're probably going to have to have two shakes a day to hit those targets. So those would be the two most important things. Yeah, I would add in there, like we always do, is eat the protein first too, is making sure that you prioritize it. You also have to explain to people how protein is unique and different in the consistency that you do it every single day versus the average. Because another mistake I see people make, especially on GLP-1s, They'll notice if you're on one or if you're ever taking one or you decide to take one, the first three days after the shot, it crushes the appetite. By the time you get to day five, six, and seven, the appetite creeps back up. And so what you might see some people do is like, let's say their target. Low to high days. Yeah, their target is 120 grams of proteins. Day one, two, and three, they barely get 60, 50, 70. And then days five, six, and seven, they get 130, 135, 140. You can't make up. Yes. Yeah, protein doesn't work like that. So carbohydrates, your body stores. Fat, your body stores. Your body doesn't really store protein. So it's got to be consistent every single day. Hit that target for this to really make a big difference. By the way, without strength training, this will do something to preserve muscle, even if you don't lift weights. This actually helps. So this is actually really, really important. The next thing is to supplement with essential amino acids. So you might be thinking, well, if I'm eating protein, why the essential amino acids? Well, here's why. Essential amino acids add an additional layer of insurance to keep muscle. Essential amino acids are the amino acids in protein that your body can't make itself. That's why they're called essential. But here's the part that I like about essential amino acids. They're easy to consume. So like a protein shake, in some cases, you might feel like you got to choke down. But essential amino acids, they come in capsules or powder, and it tastes like water. And so you could drink this in between meals. And this really does help preserve muscle. So I'd say add this to your supplement repertoire to help you preserve muscle. I mean, again, I did a whole thing where I tracked and did all this and I added it in. And the amount of muscle that I preserved in comparison to every other cut that I ever done was very surprising to me. And that's coming from somebody who was hitting their protein targets. So to me, with somebody that's on a GLP-1 that's already in that range where they're struggling to get enough calories and or protein, becomes kind of a no-brainer supplement to take. Next is use creatine. So creatine is a good, healthy supplement. It's good for longevity and healthspan. It's good for brain health. It's great for muscle. It's great for energy for your muscles. It also helps attract water to your muscles to keep them hydrated, which is what you want. So creatine, just one of those supplements, regardless of, uh, you know, your lifestyle diet, whatever, there's very, very few exceptions. Creatine will help you keep the muscle. It'll also give you some of the energy that you need to do the strength training. What I imagine too, uh, just like they've found with all the cognitive effects with that, like being low calorie, a lot of times, you know, really low energy, you got a bit more brain fog. You know, creatine will definitely help to address that. Yeah, creatine and water, I just would add to that because it's staying hydrated. What happens sometimes too, when you're not eating a lot of food, you just tend to not drink too. Some of the lean body mass that we see that people lose in the studies might actually be water too, because it blunts your appetite signal. But it's a significant percentage of the fluid that you consume comes from your food. You're dehydrated. And so you're on a GLP, you're eating less, you're probably consuming less water. So that's a good point. Drink a lot of water. All right, strength training. Here we go, lift weights. Everybody's like, yes, I need to lift weights. Here's the mistake people make on a GLP is they go too hard, too often, too much. Yep. Okay. If your calories are low, your capacity to recover and adapt to strength training is lower. It lowers. Okay. So you want to do the minimum amount to elicit the most change here. And in this case, for most people in a GLP, you know what this looks like? Two days a week of strength training. That's it. Two full body workouts, not more. More will probably not get you better results. It might actually be worse. Especially if your calories, if you're listening, your calories are 1,500, 1,400, 1,300. Yeah, don't do more than two days a week of strength training. You're not going to be able to recover from it. Very well, and it will probably cause worse results. Yeah, I would make the argument for that or even the MAPS 15 type of protocol. Like a little bit every day? Yeah, a little bit every day, just because it's- So that way you don't overdo it. Well, yeah, not only that, but just your energy is so low. I remember it was so, I mean, an hour workout seemed like a, I guess it felt like running a marathon. Totally. So doing something, I mean, I would say MAPS 15 even modified if it was just a grade eight, you know, grade eight, MAPS 15. At this point, when we're this low of calorie and we're cutting like this, we're catabolic. We're catabolic. We're not anabolic. Building muscle is anabolic. And strength training is primarily used to build muscle. That's the way most people think about it. But the way you're using it right now is to just keep muscle. So you're in the game of, I just want to keep muscle, which doesn't take a ton of volume and intensity to maintain the muscle you already have on your body. You just need enough to send a signal loud enough that says, hey, we're going to be using these muscles to move heavy weight around every once in a while. And so, hey, let's stay around. But you don't want to send a signal that's so loud that it's intense that your body can't recover. from it because you don't have enough nutrients because then it'll give it the excuse to pare it down. And so there is this fine line and dance that you're trying to do. And I think the mistake most people make in this situation is they're highly motivated to make change. It's the first time in their life they're seeing this weight come off. And so they feel like, oh, the more they lift weights, the better results you're going to get. That is not the case with this. That's right. Now focus on compound lifts. You don't have a lot of energy to waste. You don't have a lot of recovery to waste on a bunch of different exercises. Focus on the big movers, your squats, your deadlifts, your presses, your rows. Compound lifts are where you want to focus. MAPS Grade Eight is a great example of compound lift, one a day type of deal. It's a great program for something like this. And that'll also keep the most muscle. Like a bench press will do the work of three different exercises, one for chest, one for shoulders, one for triceps. But now it's just one exercise. Requires less recovery, but great adaptations. Lastly, don't let your fats get too low. So we talk about protein. Everybody knows about protein, but here's what happens sometimes with people on GLPs, right? They're really conscious about the protein intake. So they start taking all these shakes and shakes are protein and nothing else. If your fat intake is too low and you're not getting essential fats, you're not, you're going to actually starve your body. Yeah. In fact, you can starve your body with 10,000 calories if your fats are too low. Because there are, there is something known as essential fatty acids. Don't let your fats get below 60 grams. That's 60, 50 at the lowest. I've seen people, I've talked to people on GLPs. You look at their fat grams and it's like 30. 25, and they feel like crap. Their hair is getting fallen out. Their hair gets thin, all kinds of negative effects. And it's like, you got to bump your fats, dude. So don't let the fats go too low because they're essential, meaning you need a certain amount of fat for your body just to function. So you could actually put yourself in a situation that's quite dangerous because you're having so many shakes, and I'm hitting my protein targets. But I'm not getting essential fats. Olive oil, avocado, almonds. I mean, these things are crucial, I think, for somebody in this situation. And I can't stress this enough that that's so common. This is common even, like I would notice this in my own, like how quickly when I'm cutting calories, I can get down. Obviously, one of the ways to cut calories is to reduce fat. There's a lot of calories in fat. And so you reduce these foods in pursuit of getting this lower calorie. Before you know it, your fats are going. I told you off air, A while back that I was like, oh, I noticed that it was affecting my sleep. I'd have bumped my fats by 20 grams plus a day and all of a sudden my sleep got improved immediately. The other one I would add to this that I also see that's really common is fiber. And since GLP-1 slow down motility as it is, and if you're also not getting a lot of fiber, you'll also hear a lot of people report like, I haven't gone to the bathroom in four or five days. And so if you're eating super low calorie, low fat and or also low fiber, This can make a big difference too. And this will cause bloat. You won't feel good. Like you'll hold on to water. You might see the scale not moving in your head. You're going, oh my God, I'm barely eating. I'm moving. I'm doing all these things. And then the scale is staying the same. This doesn't make sense. I think then you think you got to cut more or move more and do more. When in reality, your body is just not moving that food through it properly because you're not getting enough fiber. And so make sure your fibers are good. Make sure your fat is good. Very good. Look, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram. It's Mind Pump Media. We'll see you there.