Latest / Doctor Turned Health Coach / More Protein, More Exercise, Worse Results?

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More Protein, More Exercise, Worse Results? · Doctor Turned Health Coach

• 0:22
  Today I'm going to share an interesting case study with you.
• 0:26
  This is one of my health coaching clients, one of my long-standing health coaching
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  clients, and he's currently dealing with something quite frustrating,
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  and I really feel for him.
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  He's young, but he recently discovered that his body composition was a lot worse than he thought.
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  For those of you who don't know a body composition is essentially when we can,
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  surmise what your total body fat is what your,
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  total body muscle is and your total body bone so it measures bone fat and muscle,
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  we can do that with a DEXA scan we can do it with an MRI we can do it with something
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  called in-body. That's the most popular one.
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  Basically, it's a bio-impedance where it sends a little bit of electricity to
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  your body that you can't feel. All of these are okay.
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  You can even get a great number by getting a waist-to-height ratio.
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  You measure the circumference of your waist and divide that by your height.
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  All of these are great. All of these are a good way to get an idea of your body composition.
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  And for this gentleman, unfortunately, the DEXA scan that we did was really
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  really bad he had a lot of visceral fat he had a lot of subcutaneous fat and
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  he had a lot less muscle than he thought even though he lifts regularly and,
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  he believed that his diet was really good.
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  Now, as a health coach, as a physician health coach, I am very cautious to not,
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  tell somebody what to do or how to do it.
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  I'm really there to support them through the process by talking and educating
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  and having a deep and open discussion.
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  Together, we sort of then figure out what is a proper way of approaching a certain
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  health issue through trial and error and using my very dependable.
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  Method that i've developed and it's called trend method t stands for testing,
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  r is relationships e is exercise n is nutrition and d is downtime the t the
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  testing we always test we always collect data gather information gather biomarkers.
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  And based on that, we change one of the factors like exercise or sleep or the
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  relationship you have with yourself and others and try to see how it impacts the test.
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  So for him, it was frustrating because his DEXA scan was absolutely abysmal.
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  And he thought he was doing so many things right.
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  And when we sat down to try to figure out what to do, his first idea was,
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  okay, I know what I got to do.
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  I got to add a lot more protein to my diet and.
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  I got to cut out even more carbs, and I got to work out even more.
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  So if I think about somebody who already lifts a lot of weight,
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  like this gentleman, and he's not getting results,
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  well, lifting more weights is probably going to be either unproductive or even
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  harmful, because there is such a thing as overtraining.
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  In fact, the D in my trend method, the D stands for downtime.
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  So how much downtime and recovery you give your body is how well your body can
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  actually recover, heal, grow, become stronger.
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  And this is somebody who already had a high-protein diet because he believed
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  that a high-protein diet is healthy. And this is very common.
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  I can't fault him for that.
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  In 2026, as I'm recording this, protein is definitely the talk of the town,
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  and it is the most favored macro.
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  Unfortunately, it also has a lot of consequences when it crowds out other healthy
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  foods, such as nutrients.
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  And of course, with somebody carrying so much visceral fat, we know that he
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  has a lot of fat on the liver.
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  And to get rid of that, you need a lot of vegetables, legumes,
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  green leafy vegetables that have choline and some other compounds that can help
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  draw some of that out of the liver.
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  So his idea was, I'm going to have more chicken, I'm going to have more whey
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  powder, I'm going to continue with my pre-workout, and I'm just going to cut out...
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  No, he said, I'm going to decrease the number of pieces of bread that I have,
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  and I'm going to lift more weights.
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  So after some talking, after some discussion, we came up with a slightly different
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  plan, And that's not important for this particular podcast episode.
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  But what's important is that a lot of us have these sort of blind spots.
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  We believe that something that didn't work, if we just double down on it,
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  then maybe, perhaps, it will actually work.
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  And the problem with this kind of strategy is that you often end up going in
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  circles for a long time and never really getting anywhere.
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  And what I always suggest is let's take a full step back and reassess the picture
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  and imagine it's not you.
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  Imagine it's even one of your children or imagine you're a doctor and it's one
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  of your health coaching clients.
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  What is it that you really need to do? What is it that's going to make a difference for this person?
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  Is it really that they're not having enough protein? So by my calculation,
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  he was having three grams of protein per kilogram of muscle.
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  That's way too much.
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  If you have that many calories from protein, there's no room for all the other
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  calories you have to get from healthy fats and from vegetables,
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  from other more complex carbs.
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  So a better approach is to say, okay, what are the tenets of health that we know?
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  Exercise, movement, stress management, balanced nutrition.
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  So what is balanced nutrition? Balanced nutrition is a certain amount of protein,
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  always from whole foods whenever possible, and yes, supplementing when necessary.
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  And then the exercise part, well, what do we need for fat loss?
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  Do we need more muscle building exercises or do we have to go for aerobics for
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  kind of that zone two first ventilatory threshold exercise that's actually going to burn fat?
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  Well, that's probably what he needs to aim for.
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  And so after some talking, we were able to make some adjustments.
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  But of course, for him, it was very reluctantly so because he really wants to
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  continue doing some of those things. He really wants to experiment and see if it works.
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  In a way, I recorded this podcast to give you guys an idea of how difficult
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  it can actually be to make a change and see the results. Because sometimes our
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  own minds become our own worst enemy.
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  And while the intention is good, the thinking sometimes is flawed.
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  What's great about having a health coach, about having a physician on your team,
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  is that they can give you a different perspective.
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  And they can hold you accountable to any change that you make to track and see
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  is this really improving my health,
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  so that's the approach i take with every one of my health coaching clients we
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  sit down we decide on an action we test it out within a week two weeks four weeks,
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  and if we don't see the result then we quickly jump and change we don't just
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  stick around and we definitely don't just double down on something unless we
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  got some sort of a signal if this is of value to you guys.
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  And if you're interested in one-on-one coaching, the information is in the show
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  descriptions. I would love to be on your team.