Lose Fat Without Dieting: Gary Brecka’s Science-Backed Strategies that Actually Work

all right Gary Brea people know you as a longevity guy as a you know biological age kind of guy but you're also pretty jacked and you're pretty good at you know staying lean and you've got some good advice there like what would you say your key sort of golden rules are for for staying lean or or getting lean losing fat um wow uh I would say my golden roles are consistency um you know uh fat has burned slowly over time not intensely in short periods and so for me it's about having just a consistent um

routine every day and if you saw my routine I I am I mean I probably won't be able to hold a candle to you I mean we we're g to work out after this and I'm going to be probably face down on your gym floor and you be like this guy's a biohacker um you like I'm on my 50th pullup but um you know it's it's consistency over time you know I I I do do steady state cardio every morning and I and I and I also do weight training you know minimum of four four

times a week but I think that when we look at how the some of the some of the laws of how the body you know Burns energy glucose first glycogen next fats you know last kind of in that order and that intensity matters you know for burning fat um and and nutrition matters for burning fat you know one of two things that I've seen that have had dramatic impact in when I when we're trying to take the masses and get them to lose fat and that is um we borrow Tim Ferris uh 30 3030 30

grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking followed by 30 minutes of steady state cardiovascular exercise which he deserves a credit for he wrote about it in the 4our body um and be because most people before they start out on a fat loss routine don't have any data right so they don't know if they're hypoglycemic they don't know if they're hyperglycemic which I think those two can be treated very differently um we talked about that in terms of fasting narrow feeding windows for people that have really elevated blood sugar high hemoglobin A1c and insulin resistance

and wider feeding windows for people that are more hypoglycemic and insulin sensitive because you know it's it's it's more often than not for some reason it seems to be more women than men that will come into to our clinics and go Gary I don't get it I wake up in the morning fasted um I have a cup of black coffee I go to Orange Theory for 55 minutes I go hammer down and I've been doing that 5 days a week for three months and I haven't lost a single pound like what is going on I'm

not even eating and I go well you're not eating but your body is it's just eating you and so um and so the three things that I've seen that have been really good for for fatty acid metabolism and especially in people that have stubborn weight loss issues number one is um getting the data on your glycemic profile getting the data on whether or not you're insulin resistant you're insulin sensitive you have high average blood sugar or low average blood sugar that'll determine your your feeding window and secondly um for those people that work out in

a fasted State I have seen a dramatic Improvement in their capacity to Target fat rather than to just lose weight or or be stable by taking um amino acids like a perfect blend of of the eight essential amino acids in a fasted State and working out in a fasted State um then taking protein powders and have to take all of that caloric intake in to get the amino acids because you know we we often forget that when if you're if you're taking away protein or even if you're eating a steak or you're you're eating eggs

um you're taking in the whole protein that whole protein is not what's turning into muscle that whole protein is being broken down into amino acids and eventually amino acids being sent up to the muscle to to to rebuild muscle tissue and we only think of amino acids as their contribution to building muscle but amino acids are inside of every living cell in the human body it's how we build it's how we build our red blood cells it's how we build white blood cells natural killer cells are made out of amino acids all of our connective

tissue collagen is made out of amino acids I popped a link down below for create creatine gummies 50% off of them so after today's video check them out 50% off allulose sweetened gummies these have 1.5 gam of creatine per gummy so it makes it so you can lowd dose your creatine you're talking about getting in shape for summer might make some sense helps preserve a little muscle mass by keeping your strength High even if you're in a caloric deficit there's countless bodies of research when it comes down to creatine so I'm not blowing any smoke

the stuff is legit but the little gummies make it easy to sort of micro do creatine throughout the day so I find I don't get the water attention that I would get if I were to just drank like a five or 10 gram bolus of it at one sitting not to mention 50% off is pretty darn awesome so that link is in the top line of the description underneath this video their new sty s Apple flavor wholly smokes especially with no added sugar in it off the charts so um so two things I would say

are secrets to um fat loss number one is if you're if you're working out intensely in a fasted state in my opinion you you need to take a full spectrum amino acid supplement something like a perfect Amino um if you have a if you are low glycemic um then I think 30330 is you know Tim Ferris is 303030 and we've seen dramatic um fat loss in in clients that we that we put on a 30330 program that have that are otherwise hypoglycemic and so once again what does the 30330 look like 30 grams of protein

okay within 30 minutes of waking okay followed by 30 minutes of steady state cardio okay in what time block um so you're you're within 30 minutes of waking is when you're for the but what about for the protein so all within 30 minutes in the cardio too no taking the protein within 30 minutes of waking and then starting your um exercise immediately thereafter yeah and and you know i' I've read a lot of um you know studies that you're still not that that protein is not making it into the blood for you know 30 to

60 minutes maybe 40 to 60 minutes anyway so I don't know that feeding immediately prior to or in this non-existent anabolic Windows is is making any difference you want the you want the amino acids to be available once the muscle is damaged to to to repair to repair the muscle so people that are um hypoglycemic or have very sensitive insin insulin or have low um blood sugar because they're actually starting with low glucose and they're going to immediately get into their glycolic Reserve right I mean we know that the muscles um retain glycogen and don't

contribute it back to the to the body the liver retains glycogen and does turn it back into sugar so so it actually throws it back into the bloodstream one of the reasons why our blood sugar rises in the morning or not eating for for people that start to wear uh constant glucose monitors sometimes that that is like a little shocking to them that they wake up in the morning the blood sugar starts to rise and they haven't eaten um so 30 30 30 for for we we we try to get data on on patients always

I mean we're we're data driven organization I'm a data driven person um so I believe that once you know what your glycemic profile is um are you working against insulin resistance and hypoglycemia or are you working with sensitive insulin and possibly hypoglycemia or or very good blood sugar in which case we found that Tim Ferris is 30 30 30 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking immediately followed by 30 minutes of steady state cardiovascular exercise Works extraordinarily well I just did a I just did a 30 30 30 challenge with about 50 3,000

people or so about 50 53,000 people that participated in it and and the ments and the um and the changes that we saw over uh 6 weeks were were pretty dramatic and then there um are those people that are insulin resistant they're a little more hypoglycemic and and again I'm trying to fit people into broad categories um we put them on something called a perfect amino acid uh by Body Health which was just the eight essential amino acids um prior prior to workout and they worked out in a fasted State and had very similar results

so in this in this case were the aminos serving as an anti-catabolic or was there another effect that you were looking for with that as well well I think they're anti-catabolic and there and and you know when Once the muscle is damaged they're they're first of all they're anti-catabolic so we're not burning lean muscle because we actually can you you can burn lean muscle during intense exercise once you get through your glycolic Reserve especially if you start in a low glycemic State and then you um in that that gluconeogenesis only lasts for a period of

time and now you're you're tapping your lean muscle almost like an accordion and you're um you know you're burning lean muscle during the exercise and then slowly building lean muscle back and then burning it during exercise and building it back and burning it and building it back and not actually tapping our our fat Reserve which is you know back to the example of the you know the woman that comes into the clinic and I'm just picking on ladies here for a second it happens to men too um that say I am working out very intensely

in a fasted State you know maybe with just something like black coffee or pre-workout um and I've been doing this pretty consistently over a pretty prolonged period of time and I'm not losing weight I'm not losing fat and and what most people mean when they want to lose weight what they really mean is I want to lose fat yeah um um which which brings you to the danger of things like OIC and you know seatide and tepati and some of the some of these glp1 Inhibitors um is that you know people are not just losing

fat they're losing lean body mass in a lot of cases yeah significantly that's been definitely the they call it what uh OIC face right that's really starts toat fat it's a real thing and on the eyes so the eyes really get sunken in cuz you really can't spot remove fat so that why I look the way I look I'm pretty sunken you don't look sunken to me man you look pretty healthy to me I just this what happens when your face is lean I don't I don't pick you somebody that's on samag tide or to

TI for sure that would probably be problematic but yeah it's I've noticed I've done a little bit of a pivot with you know my my take on EAS over the last like year or so too like I used to be pretty concerned ered with the insulin Spike that would come along with Lucine right you know but then the more that I kind of read and realized first of all I mean you're talking a I mean it's a significant insulin Spike for what it is but it's also an insulin Spike that is countered by by glucagon

so you're not really having this hu it's not like you're having a rise in blood sugar that's coming from amino acids right you're getting that's shuttling them into the muscle that's the point of the insulin Spike that goes along with Lucine right so I used to think it was kind of problematic for people that were say you know fasting being like well this would effectively break a fast and then I kind of started thinking about it I'm like you know I tell people it's okay to have black coffee if they're fasting if you want to

get literal that's breaking a fast too so I'm kind of like I think if you ingest anything you're not officially completely fasting right like you're not you can't claim that like I am 100% water fasting even if you have coffee even though I think it's perfectly fine to have coffee when you're fasting so do I and I used to think uh so used to think okay well if you know coffee's fine but but Amino is maybe not I started realizing you know actually there's probably a benefit here and uh and so I have no vested

interest with any Amino company whatsoever but I've noticed that I I do get a little bit of an energy from it too like I feel like maybe there's something as far as a feedback system is concerned where your body's sensing locen availability so it's maybe a little bit more of a time of abundance so you can like push it a little bit harder um what's your take with fasted cardio or fasted workouts in general if intensity is a little bit higher so you mentioned like you know kind of easy cardio in a fasted state with

some aminos um what's your take on maybe increasing the intensity doing some hit versus doing uh or or even some resistance trading or some metcons CrossFit style stuff so so I wouldn't I wouldn't say that that in our clinic setting we have a huge metaanalysis of of patients where we've we've switched up the intensity of their training but what I will tell you that we we we see in general and this is based on large pools of anecdotal data um when when you're exercising intensely in a fasted state it is more difficult to Simply assume

that you are targeting fatty acid metabolism and all of that you're burning is is is fat because some of what you're going to burn is lean muscle and you know once you're once the amount of glucose in your blood doesn't go to zero but once the amount of GL glucose gets in in your blood to the point where your liver switches to gluconeogenesis so it takes a stored glycogen and turns it back into glucose and starts to throw that back into the blood and then the muscles are burning the stored glycogen that's in the muscle

the question becomes you know what happens when you're at the end of that glycolic Reserve so you're you're exercising intensely over a long period of time and now your your your glycin stores are depleted you know we'd love to think that there's just an immediate switch to fatty acid metabolism that we just go right to burning fat but that's actually not true um we do burn some of our own lean muscle and and it's we we are adapted to mning lean muscle as as a source of energy it's a perfectly normal thing it's not like

um you know the body doesn't actually prefer to burn fat I mean um if if you look at what the brain and and most of our regulatory organs like the pituitary are concerned with they're concerned with survival they're not concerned with how fat or how skinny you are or how pretty your skin is or whether your hair texture is good it's concerned with survival and this is why when we try to outsmart some of the systems like um you know one of the reasons why you never see one follow-up episode on The Biggest Loser is

because almost without a single exception those people not only gained all the weight that they lost back but they ballooned catastrophic new weights and why is that it's because we tried to you know trick the pituitary we tried to game the pituitary and say well we're going to put you into a prolonged severe caloric deficit and what happened the pituitary adjusted the metabolism it throttled back the metabolism very significantly you can see this when you look at um thyroid lab work you know in prolonged caloric deficits um you will see that the thyroid Dr the

tary drops a signaling hormone called TSH thyroid stimulating hormone and in reducing this um T TSH signal you you you reduce the T4 and and the T3 production mainly T4 because most of the T3 is actually made outside of thyroid but it's deiz in the liver the periphery the gut but you will see a a a red reduction in in thyroid hormones corresponding to a slower metabolic rate and so um if you're I think it's fine to exercise in a fasted state but from what we have seen in in large pools of of of patients

coming through our clinic setting exercising for a prolonged period of time in a at high intensity in a fasted state does not in improve fat loss yeah it does not I think I would tend to agree I don't think it is equating to more fat loss right it's I think at that rate it just comes down to okay if you're and people forget that I mean working out at a moderate intensity compared to it intense intensity it's not and for 30 minutes it's not a huge huge difference in calories I mean there's a big difference

in calories let's put it that way but it's not a giant dent in total calories for the day right so it's like if you train at a moderate intensity for 30 minutes and you burn 200 calories and you train at a high higher intensity maybe you'll burn 270 but that's not giving you a license to you know go eat more later right because it's you're going to quickly Eclipse that 70 calories with yeah even though you feel like you know you earned that extra and you might even you know I might even argue that the

extra dip in in in blood sugar um causes potentially you know a a greater distance for insulin to travel in there for a great greater hunger Spike oh yeah you I think that's been uh you know demonstrated at least with kin and whatnot I mean more intense exercise uh there's a brief period of time where appetite is blunted shortly thereafter but then after that it's a pretty aggressive rebound I need yeah it's and and especially in someone that is metabolically damaged that could be a huge problem because then they're uh then they have this impetus

to eat so much their system is broken and their ability to convert that into fuel appropriately is already broken so thus Begins the cycle of storing and and Ley and we know that you know when when insulin is when our blood sugar is fall ining we get we get very hungry once our blood sugars fall in we usually are no longer hungry I mean that's that whole phenomenon about you know I arrived to the restaurant and and I was so hungry I ordered everything on the menu and by the time the food came out I

was no longer hungry I mean that's the that's the the difference between blood sugar falling as you arrive to the restaurant and blood sugar had fall in by the time the food food came out and so I I I think you're right you you look at the distance that insulin is traveling and that your blood sugar is traveling um making your blood sugar your insulin look like a heart monitor rather than looking like Rolling Hills um I think this has a tendency to have you overeat or at least battle those those Cravings later in the

day whereas um using a um a full spectrum amino acid supplement I mean all eight amino acids in the right ratio because remember if the the eight essential amino acids is you start to deplete if if you took three of those amino acids out and to still took that amino acid supplement dramatically different result in the amount that would be converted into sugar or fat um because once you don't have the essentials in the right ratio the excess is going to be converted or stored as energy it's either going to be converted into sugar it's

going to be stored as as as fat that's that's I think why the old BCAA Theory went out the window you know years ago because there was the big push to just take Branch chain amino acids Lucine isoline veine and that two to1 to one famous ratio and we realize that even though those are being you know used at the muscle level that that just taking the branch chain amino acids had you know dramatically reduced Impact versus taking the full spectrum of essential aminos there's some pretty interesting evidence with uh taking essential amino acids alongside

a protein meal as well and how it increases the uh the rate of like protein availability essentially so I can't remember I would I would believe in it and you're essentially I mean you're essentially you're not a BCAA guy right definitely not a BCA yeah no I've made that pretty clear so it's and I think most of the literature has made that pretty clear too but I mean there's a lot of uh like fly off the shells BCA oh yeah I used to pound them like crazy when I was you know trying to put on

mass and you know long long time ago like long before any of this stuff right so it's uh but I think it was just SE rope I don't think it was really you know you might have Placebo yourself into something Place Placebo yourself but no I think I think there's definitely and think there's Merit to sipping on you know EAS a little bit throughout the day here and there I mean I don't know if it's something you want to have a continuous stream of constantly signaling uh you know Lucine being like a PR growth thing

you're constantly constantly quote unquote signaling Pro growth right so I don't know if you want to sip on them throughout the day but I have found there's some use you know in between maybe like a long gap between say lunch and dinner something like that where I'm like you know what I'm not super hungry but I could eat but maybe F I could probably sand to have a little protein but I don't really want to have a full meal or a protein shake right now like I feel like that has some Merit to it right

um and especially I know I'm a little bit of a different category for a lot of people that might be watching that are looking for fat loss case but for me like if I'm going from 7% body fat and I'm trying to get down to maybe five for whatever reason for a shoot or for something in particular being already lean squeaking that last couple percent of fat loss you're at a much higher risk of catabolizing breaking down muscle when you're much leaner so EAS have become more important to me now as I try to stay

as you know lean as I can year round because I'm like okay if I need to go add some extra cardio in yeah it might make more sense for me to be sipping on some aminos during this time yeah I mean if if people on just a simple fix adding in 35 minutes of steady state cardiovascular exercise with 50 milligrams of essential amino acids the eight essential amino acids run that for 30 days and recheck your BMI I think you'd be shocked at how at at how much that's impacted your your fatty acid metabolism and

quickly what's your what's your take on nutrient quality versus calories you know I it's it's funny how you people are all over the place on this like um that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie and it really doesn't matter or the source of a calorie I you know I disagree with that because calorie calories really a measure of heat right it's amount of roughly um the amount of heat that it takes to raise one CU cubic centimeter of water one degree centigrate so the so the so the caloric measurement is the same but

the source of that you know it takes there different amounts of energy that are taken to turn different types of of foods into into energy so there's there is an expenditure there's a cost to actually pulling the energy out of that and there is plenty of evidence that says that the more nutrient-dense the food um the sooner we are satiated because the satiation response isn't necessarily just volume going into our stomach it's a response by the brain to say we've gotten enough nutrients I mean why do people that eat high amounts of processed sugar high

amounts of processed foods have a tendency to binge eat or overeat even though they're eating the um more calories they are hungry more often well a lot of it has to do with the you know the insulin Spike and the insulin figan but it also has to do with the lack of nutrient density and the less dense foods are nutrient wise the more we continue to eat to try to get to the nutrients that we're that we're missing and you know what's what's sad is that you know we we we don't update the labels for

you know um from soil lineage studies to look at the nutrient density of of certain food so if you sometimes if you flip over a a pack of spinach let's say and it says that um and the macros have been updated so and you look at the amount of um fat or protein or carbohydrate or dietary fiber and sugars in there that that data is current the the nutrient density we have borrowed from decades old soil lineage studies so we've imported that and we and and we just because we don't have to update it um

we we import that and we put it back on a spin label and we say well a spinach leaf 40 years ago has the same amount of calcium has the same amount of iron has the same amount of magnesium as it did and the soil is so depleted that very often that the the nutrient content that's on that those labels is entirely false um the macros are non but the nutrient density is entirely false well even with the macros I mean there's like a 20% Delta in terms of uh or or variance right like there

can be a 20% margin of error on in just even the calories right so it's that's even if you are counting calories like what you see on a label is not exactly I mean it's if you have a you know 20% variance on a or a margin of error and you're talking of food that is is predominantly fats right I mean like that can be a pretty that's a big swing especially over the course of you know X number of meals per day x number of days per week X number of weeks per month I

I couldn't agree with you more if you're eating you know 5,000 calories a day which you know not a lot of people are doing that but I mean that's that's a thousand extra or less calories right on either side of that so if you're 25 that's a 500 you know probably most people like you have to give yourself a margin of error of between 5 and 700 calories even if you're looking at calories and uh the more that I'm you know doing what I'm doing now too I'm starting to realize that you know I think

that the nutrient quality piece is I'd probably go on record and say that at this point I think it's at least 5050 you know meaning the nutrient density of the food and and and the thermodynamic part of it right so I think there's I think they and they don't necessarily operate like linearly and I think that's it's probably a weird step ladder thing where in times of starvation perhaps nutrient quality becomes more important in times of abundance maybe always going to be these things like when there's be and because you can't it's one of the

many functions of glp1 is to also kind of help regulate and find homeostasis for our glucose but also regulate like when we need to stop eating so you can't say glp1 is effective without acknowledging that like okay there's certain foods that increase GP one so much more right protein right so it's there's not just a calorie discussion going on here if protein is going to you know trigger this glp1 response that's going to ultimately tell your brain to start regulating chill out on the appetite you know whatever even though the appetite suppression is sort of

a I call it almost an off Lael use of the glp1 I mean glp1 essentially is to bring us back to glucose homeostasis but there's a lot of other pieces that are going on in terms of feedback loops with the brain with these you know semaglutide I I agree with that and I think that you know a lot of times you know some of the worst science that that we do on human beings is where we study things in isolation yeah right I mean we study one compound so we take LDL cholesterol for example um

um or or glucose and um and we look at cellular metabolism in a very myopic light you know we take a cell out of the body out of the community in which it exists and we study in aetris or in vitro and we say because of this behavioral characteristic if we put the cell back into the body we assume that it's going to um behave the same way and I I I I like what you were just describing because I don't think anything is that linear yeah right like when people say the only way to

lose fat is to do this um you know I I I find that to be very misleading because you know like I said we we we use large pools of data um to try to guide when we um supplement large pools of patients with a certain supplement we watch a biomarker um stay the same or or or adjust in the percentage that we have have an adjustment in large pools of data you know you get some you take an assumption you and you validate it by looking at very large pools of data but then you

also have the outliers right and and it happens in every measure of physiologic function that we try to that we try to track even with large you know pools of data and obviously you can't do a experiment on people without but we can say Well when they go on this blend of of of B vitamins with this micronutrient versus this blend of B vitamins with this micronutrient we see a much bigger correction in homoy we see a much bigger correction in C reactive protein and and yet you always have those outliers which is why um

I've really tried to stop talking in absolutes yeah um but like if you had asked me that question 10 years ago you know what's what's the best way to burn fat I would have just said 30 30 30 yeah but then then I realized that that didn't work for everybody um it works for the vast majority of people people especially if they're starting in a baseline where they're just not even doing an exercise program sometimes you just need people to do something it's better than nothing like what's the best way to burn fat just walk

for 35 minutes if you're not moving right and that will actually start your uh that'll start your fat loss Journey um then when you get to a competitive level like you know like yourself and you try to go from 9% body fat to 7% body fat well that's a whole different animal um but for the majority of people I think that exercising in a fast state with um taking the eight essential amino acids prior to exercise is a is a phenomenal place to start um and for for the people that are have you know more

more um you know faster blood sugar you know that are that are more insulin sensitive and have lower blood sugars 30 30 30 is a you know in a category would be a great place to start I agree it's a good place to start for sure because it's gonna it's G to Fan out to a million different directions as soon as someone yeah and as more data comes out like it gets it gets more confusing yeah and I think we can all probably agree I mean you and I but probably people watching that if if

we had obesity and weight loss solved as far as it just being a matter of counting calories I do think that more people would be losing weight so doubt I'm not and that's not a bag on calories and calories out it's really not it's more so underscoring the complexity of our human body right it's it's not saying that I do think that there are a large number of people with functioning metabolisms that could probably count calories and lose weight yeah but I think there are a large number of people that and call it satiety issues

call it uh whatever you want where they ultimately end up eating more in a sort of an unconscious fashion where they just they don't realize they're eating more but they are um and it's being driven by perhaps nutrient scarcity perhaps all these other different things hormonal whatever the bottom line is it's exceptionally complex there's some people that'll say we don't need to do any more weight loss studies we have it figured out there's other people say we don't need to do any more weight loss studies because we'll never figure it out um so it's complex

so I think having these simple tools like you mentioned just concrete things that we know make an impact look at your own data I think that's one of the best things man that's the best thing where can everyone find you um you can find me on Instagram at Gary Brea um or at the ultimate human.com or um you know the ultimate human podcast wherever you're listen to your podcast perfect awesome brother thanks brother great one