Greenville Gains Podcast: Episode 1

In this podcast episode, Evan Levy discusses nutrition and provides tips for incorporating it into fitness goals. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on one specific goal at a time, such as building muscle or losing body fat. He also explains the concept of calories and how they relate to weight loss or weight gain. Evan recommends using a macro calculator to determine the daily calorie and macronutrient targets. Finally, he advises creating a meal plan that aligns with these targets and fits into one's schedule and personal taste preferences. He suggests prioritizing whole, unprocessed foods and allowing for some flexibility in the diet. Overall, the key steps are: choosing a goal, determining calorie and macro targets, and creating a meal plan. Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Evan Levy, and welcome to the official Greenville Games podcast. Here, we will be discussing lifting, nutrition, business, and mindset, along with other topics in the future. Today, thanks to popular demand, we will be talking about nutrition. It's personally not my favorite topic to talk about because it's so controversial, but it's what you guys voted for, so I have to give the people what they want. My goal today is to hopefully simplify some basic nutrition principles and give you guys the clarity to move forward with your fitness goals. Keep in mind, this is my first podcast ever, so please bear with me. I'll try to keep it short and sweet, so here goes. Also a disclaimer, in case you don't know, I'm from New Jersey, where our second language is cursing, so I'll try to hold back, but just give you guys a heads up in case I drop a couple F-bombs. If you're listening to this with kids around, you might want to use headphones or come back to it another time. Anyway, let's rock and roll. When it comes to incorporating your nutrition into your fitness goals, there are three main steps to get started. Number one is focus on one goal. Number two, figure out your daily calories and macronutrient targets. Number three, create your meal plan that hits these numbers and fits your schedule, needs, personal taste, etc. Those are the overview of what we're going to talk about today, and now we're going to get into a little more detail. Let's start with number one, focusing on one goal. I've been a coach for a long time. I've been lifting for 18 years and coaching other people for 14 years. I've worked with hundreds, maybe even thousands of people at this point, and a lot of people come to me and, yo, Evan, listen, I want to get in shape. I want to get stronger, build muscle, burn fat, increase my stamina, get more flexible, like all at the same time. You could do that stuff all at the same time, but it's not really optimal. The best bet is really to focus on one specific goal at a time. The more specific you are, the easier it is to create a program that caters to that goal instead of having your goals scattered in so many different ways. It's easier to put your energy into one thing, at least at the beginning. Your body only has so many resources and energy to go around, so you just can't do everything at once. It doesn't make sense. Really focus on what specific goal you want to achieve and try to be as specific as possible. For example, some good goals might be, I want to build 10 pounds of lean muscle. I want to lose 20 pounds of body fat. I want to hit a 365 squat, 225 bench, 405 deadlift. Something specific that's tangible, where as you go through your program, you can see exactly how close or how far you are to your goal, and you can have checkpoints along the way. That's number one, really hone in on exactly what your goal is. Remember, once you achieve your goal, you could always move the goalpost and set a new goal. That doesn't mean whatever you choose doesn't have to be your goal the rest of your life. It's just for, let's say, a few months, could be three months, six months, however long it takes, and then you pick a new goal. That's number one. Number two is figuring out your calories and your macros, your daily targets per day. In a nutshell, what are calories? Calories are just a unit of energy. We need to eat calories and we also burn calories. In general, if you want to lose weight, lose body fat, you want to be in a calorie deficit. That means you're eating less than you're burning. Now, if you want to gain weight, you want to hopefully build muscle. I'm assuming you guys don't want to gain fat, so we want to gain weight and gain muscle weight. You want to be in a calorie surplus. That means you're eating more calories than you're burning. It's the basic law of thermodynamics. Calories in, calories out. This is a major, major principle that really cannot be avoided. No matter what diet you're using, whether it be keto or South Beach or Atkins or paleo, whatever it may be, carnivore, vegan, whatever, whatever your goal is, it has to be either in a calorie deficit or a calorie surplus, depending on your goal. I'm not big on specific diets like that, by the way. That's a whole different topic for another episode. The important thing is these principles that I'm telling you now. It's figuring out your goal, and then number two, finding out your daily calories and macros. The website that I use for myself and my clients over the years is www.iisym.com slash macro dash calculator. If you put this in, there are a ton of macro calculators out there. I find this one to be the most accurate because it takes into account the most variables. This is the one that I personally use for hundreds of people, hundreds of meal plans over the years. I think it's very accurate, and I would suggest you use it too. If you happen to find a better one, let me know, and maybe I'll switch over. This one works really well. It only takes you about a minute or two. You put in all your variables, gender, age, height, weight, activity level, body fat percentage, so on and so forth, and it's going to tell you exactly how many calories, proteins, carbs, and fats that you need per day in order to reach your goal. Once those numbers pop up, make sure you write them down or you put it in your phone, take a picture, whatever you've got to do, and then you have those numbers to work with. That's number two. Now we have the numbers. Once you have the numbers, number three is to create a meal plan based on those numbers. Whatever meal plan you come up with for yourself, or you can hire a professional coach to do it for you and do the thinking for you, but either way, it's the same process. You want to come up with a meal plan that's going to include meals and snacks that are going to hit your calorie and macro totals for the day. Let's just make the numbers easy. Let's say you're trying to lose weight and you have to be eating 2,000 calories a day, and you're eating 150 grams of protein, 200 grams of carbs, I don't really know the numbers, I'm just kind of spitballing here, and 75 grams of fat. Now those are your targets. That doesn't mean it has to be perfect, but you're trying to shoot for those targets every single day. You come up with meals and snacks that add up to the total for that day. You could use MyFitnessPal or some similar app to get the exact numbers that you need for the specific foods. You want to make sure the meal plan is conducive to your daily schedule. If you're a morning person, you wake up at 5 a.m. every day, then make the meal plan conducive to that. If you're working a 9 to 5, make sure you can prepare food that you can bring to work, or whatever your job or your schedule is. Or maybe you work from home and it's easy and you have the food right there. Or you're on the road all day and you have to bring a cooler with the meals. Whatever it is, this is already hard enough. You want the plan to be as conducive as possible for you and eliminate as much pain as possible. Also, you want to make sure that you include some foods that you like. You don't have to avoid everything that you like, and you don't have to eat everything you dislike. That's not what it's about. It's figuring out foods that you like that are going to fit your numbers for every day and fit your schedule. Sometimes you have to eat some foods that maybe you don't like too much, or maybe you don't like broccoli or Brussels sprouts or something like that, but you have to get veggies in somehow. So be it. Sometimes you've just got to do what you've got to do. We're not little kids here. You've got to sometimes be an adult, suck it up, and do what you're supposed to do. You want to focus mostly on whole, real, natural, unprocessed foods. That doesn't mean you have to be perfect every single meal and snack. But for the most part, the majority, the far majority of your diet should be real food. Food that's one ingredient, maybe two or three. But when you go to the grocery store, try to stay on the outside of the aisles, or the outer aisles, I should say. Most of the processed food and junk is in the middle. Stay on the outside. You're focusing on getting foods in the protein category, eggs, meat, chicken, greek yogurt, whatever. Carbs, so natural carbs are going to be best, oatmeal, cream of rice, regular rice, potatoes, quinoa, things like that. Fats, healthy fats, could be something like avocados, olive oil, almonds, the fats that are naturally present in your proteins, like eggs or steak. And then you want to have a variety of vegetables. Any vegetables, it doesn't really matter, just pick the ones you like. And same with fruits, pick the ones that you like. Maybe you like blueberries, pineapple, and strawberries, that's great. You don't have to eat the same fruit and vegetables every single time. They're very low calorie, very healthy, and you can incorporate them into any meal plan. Now when it comes to the diet, most people say 80-20, the 80-20 principle. I personally think that's maybe a little too lenient. It gives you too much room for error, and I think it's too easy to kind of go off the rails with that. So I would recommend a little bit stricter, maybe like 85-90% of the time, be strict with the plan. And then if you do that, you still have plenty of wiggle room to have cheat meals and treats, you know, cookies, cake, crackers, sweets, ice cream, whatever you want. But you have to earn it, so if you're strict 85-90% of the time, you have that little bit of wiggle room to have your treats and cheats and that sort of thing. So just keep that in mind. So just to recap, once again, if you want to incorporate your nutrition into your fitness goals, there are three main steps that you want to do, or three steps that I think you should do. So number one, once again, is pick a goal. Focus on one goal. The more specific you are, the better. Number two is figure out your daily calories and macros. And number three is create a meal plan that hits these numbers and includes food that you like and fits your schedule. So that's basically it, guys. I mean, you know, people get way, way, way too stressed and anxious and complicated with their nutrition. It's really, honestly, it's not that complicated. If you follow these three steps, you're already ahead of the game and, you know, already doing better than a lot of people. So try not to get wrapped up in the details and the different diets and stuff like that because there's a lot of BS out there and misinformation or conflicting opinions or something that might not be for you. But if you follow these three steps, I think it will go a long way in getting you towards your fitness goals. So anyway, guys, I hope you liked this episode. If you liked it and got value out of it, please do me a favor and share the show with your friends and family who maybe they'll benefit from it as well. So thank you and I'll see you next time. Let's keep getting those gains.