One of the most important and critical phases of any fat loss diet, yet also one of the most underrated and underappreciated phases of any fat loss diet is the primer phase. This is the diet before the diet. What I mean by that is what you are doing to prepare your body and your mind for the diet itself. And in this episode of the podcast, I'm going to teach you all about this phase, which again we call the primer phase.
This episode will also be Part 1 of a three-part series covering all three phases of fat loss that we take our clients through at Taylor Coaching Method. Phase one being the Primer phase, which is before the fat loss phase starts and as designed to optimally prepare you for the fat loss phase coming up next. We do this so that your body adapts the way we want it to rather than being stubborn to the changes we are attempting to make and see.
Phase 2 will be Part 2 of this series and that will cover the progressive phase, which is where we attack the fat loss goal itself. And then phase three will be Part 3 of this series, which is the Prosper phase. This is where we reverse diet and transition out of the diet into normal life. If once again avoiding weight
regain. If you've ever felt like your body doesn't cooperate with you when you attempt to lose weight or that you've never successfully kept the weight off after you've lost it, this podcast series is going to help you tremendously. So TuneIn and get ready to change the way you do things. The greatest things in life all start with a challenge. The greatest things in life. You must accept that everything is hard before it gets easy.
Every, every, every, everything you want in life begins with a hard path, begins with a first initial phase where we are preparing for the fat loss diet to come. There's a few things we're going to cover. We're going to be trying to accomplish stability of our hormones. So we're trying to really optimize our hormonal system, removing any imbalances or
dysfunctions. And we are trying to really get a good solid baseline for our metabolism, meaning we're not going to heal our metabolism or reverse diet in a way that's going to reverse all hormonal adaptations. But if somebody isn't properly eating and moving and recovering, they could have some dysfunction here and they might not have a completely healthy or balanced hormone system or metabolism. We just want to make sure that we create a good baseline and we create a good healthy baseline
to begin from. It's kind of like our foundation, right? And everything we do really establishes that foundation. Much like when you're building a house, if you want to build a house that lasts a long time and has a stable structure, you have to have a solid foundation because that's what the house is built on. Well, we don't need to get into the fancy nutrition protocols and really dive into the aggressive fat loss phases until we establish that foundation, and that's what we're doing
here. So the first aspect is stabilize hormones and metabolism. Then we're going to really try to manage stress and optimize recovery. We're then going to really focus on developing consistency and increasing the adherence of the client. After that, we are going to try to create some kind of standardization within the diet so that we have an easier time adjusting the diet for fat loss results.
And last but not least, we have establishing baselines and we're really just trying to get our baseline metrics that we can adjust from going into the fat loss phase because if we don't have metrics to adjust, then what are we really doing here, right? It's like Agpsi can't get you where you want to be if I don't have a starting address. And that starting address are these baselines that we're trying to track and these metrics we're accumulating during this primer phase. All right.
So the first aspect that I covered here, stabilizing hormones, the easiest way for us to understand this without going into a full hormone lecture is that hormones kind of influence everything that's going on with our metabolism, right? We're, we're not going to easily be able to lose fat if we don't
have a healthy hormonal system. And it, it's very much so a, it's a double edged sword in many ways because on one end, if we have dysfunctional hormones, then it's going to be hard for calories in versus calories out to help us lose fat because hormones impact our metabolism so much. But on the other side, if we don't optimize calories in versus calories out, that can negatively impact our hormones as well. If we get too lean, it can
negatively impact our hormones. If we get too fat, it can negatively impact our hormones, right? So we always have this kind of push and pull and we can't be on either sides of the spectrum. We have to find balance. And that's why it's important to just be aware of where hormones are AT. And in this phase of the diet, this primer phase, we're not trying to create any specific hormone result. If somebody has a hormone issue that is a complete different protocol.
What we're trying to do with this stabilizing hormones area or or aspect of this primer phase is really just make sure that we're crossing our TS and dotting our IS. We're checking off all the boxes that we know of that will positively influence the hormone system so that we can say we've done everything we can to make sure that they're in a good stable place with their endocrine system, their hormone
system. An easy way to look at this is that 90% of our hormone imbalances and dysfunctions can be solved by better managing stress. Now, that's not a literal percentage from a study because there isn't a study that shows this. However, there are numerous studies that show what does impact our hormones both positively and negatively. And the positive ones are when stress is reduced and recovery
is increased. And the negative ones are showing that when stress is increased and recovery is decreased, we have worse off hormones, right? So how do we do this? How do we manage stress to improve our hormones? It's really simple. We eat more calories. We're going to get higher quality and quantity, so more sleep and better sleep. We're going to manage the life stress better. And we're going to improve program design within the gym.
And specifically with that, we're going to make sure we're not overtraining, right? It doesn't always mean you need to train less because sometimes people's programming is just so bad that it doesn't allow them to optimally recover between sets and between days in the gym and weeks training, essentially. So we can string together training sessions and exercise sequencing to improve this. But there's also times where people are just over training, right?
But regardless, we need to improve the training. And if we eat more, we sleep more and we manage stress better, as well as maybe train less, we're probably going to manage hormones much better. However, a lot of those things don't lead to better results long term, as you know, because you have to train hard, you have to train often, and sometimes you have to eat less to lose fat.
But that's why in this phase, we are trying to do this in order to improve the hormones, not necessarily lose fat. The other aspect of this hormone area is the metabolism, right? And your metabolism will improve almost immediately when your hormones do. The hormone system is going to negatively impact testosterone, thyroid, it's going to increase cortisol, which is a stress hormone.
All of these things are going to negatively impact the metabolism, most likely slow the metabolism down, especially the thyroid hormone that is like the big driver or the control system, you could say of the metabolism. So when somebody has hype, so thyroidism for example, or Hashimoto's, that's going to slow down the metabolism because it's a slowing of the thyroid. And when we diet or we're eating too little or we're having a lot of stress, that is exactly what
can happen. And we don't want to be in that state going into a diet because the diet is not going to work. You're already dieted down, you're already slowing the metabolism down and stressing the thyroid out. We need to reverse that. So the big thing to understand here is that we just need to get into maintenance calories in order to support a healthier metabolism. 1, because eating more food is going to lead to a faster metabolism.
But 2. When we bring our calories up to maintenance, and this could be because the client has been off and on yo-yo dieting before reaching us, or it's because the person is trying to diet. And through the week they're great and they're eating low calories, which throughout the week might drop some weight, but it's also suppressing their thyroid and metabolism. And then on the weekend they binge or they go party or they eat way more calories than they
realize and that puts on weight. So, you know, net result by the end of the week, they don't lose weight, but they are cyclically negatively impacting their hormones. So we want to recover this. And part of that means, you know, in that process, we're going to also improve our metabolism. And if we look at this here, eating more calories is the most effective way to directly increase your metabolism because you know these different abbreviations, this is a percentages of our total daily
energy expenditure. So that is how many calories we burn per day. We have eat, EAT, exercise, activity, thermogenesis. We have TEF which is thermic effect of food. So that's how many calories you burn through digestion. And we have NEAT non exercise activity thermogenesis. This is how many calories we burn just from involuntary movement, right? Subconsciously walking and moving. And the the way I'm moving my hands as I talk right now is, is
part of NEAT. And then we have BMR, our basal metabolic rate, which is just how many calories it requires, you know, for me to just sit here and not say a word, how many calories does that require? My body requires calories to just survive. That's your BMR, right? And so knowing this well, if we look at EAT exercise activity thermogenesis, if we eat more, we're going to train better, we're train harder, we're going to be more muscle.
That's going to increase our TEF is thermic effective food, meaning the more food we eat, the more calories we burn because more calories are being burned through thermic effective food. And then our NEAT, our non exercise activity thermogenesis, that is going to improve as
well. So we're going to actually walk more, we're going to talk more, move more, our hand gestures are going to be more standing more, all these things that we do throughout the day that burn calories through movement, that is non exercise activity. I'm not intentionally exercising right now, but I am moving and that requires calories. Those increase and there's a lot of research to prove this.
In fact, there's even research to show if you eat the majority of your calories in the morning, so you have a large bowl of calories for breakfast, let's say that's your biggest meal of the day. You are going to have a higher NEAT and a faster metabolism throughout the day. There's a lot of good research on what's called chrono nutrition and it's time restricted feeding in a in a specific way. Instead of fasting in the morning, they're placing their biggest meal in the morning and
stopping earlier in the day. But what they also found is that eating more calories in the morning led to a higher energy expenditure per day, which meant a higher maintenance caloric intake per person, which is obvious. You eat more, you have more energy, you move more.
But this is exactly why during this primer phase, we want to capitalize on these aspects so that we can improve the metabolism, we can get more movement, better training, and actually eat more food, which allows us to start the diet from a better position. The next aspect of the primer phase that we are trying to really get a benefit from is stress, right? Managing stress and optimizing
recovery. And I've already kind of alluded to, you know, eating more food and sleeping more in these things are going to help our hormones, help our get better, have a better metabolism and also have a better ability to manage stress and recover. But how do we actually do some of this right? So first we need to eat more. We've said that next, I would recommend increasing carbs and protein. Carbs are going to help reduce
course all. Course, all is a stress hormone and they have an inverse relationship. Insulin, the hormone insulin has an inverse relationship with cortisol. So when we eat carbs, insulin does spike up and a lot of people are afraid of this. This is not a bad thing. In fact, insulin is a, a essentially an energy utilization hormone. It helps us store energy for better use.
And if you're training hard, you need that because it's going to help you store carbohydrates as as muscle glycogen to train harder and build muscle. But when insulin goes up, cortisol goes down. So a really good way to manage cortisol, the stress hormone, is to actually eat carbs because it's going to help reduce and blunt down that cortisol response. So we want more carbs.
We also want more protein because that's going to improve recovery from training and overall reduce physical stress. As most people know, we want to increase sleep quality and quantity. Quantity, I would suggest 7 plus hours per night. This is going to help avoid having low inhibition and low stress capacity. So research shows the less hours of sleep you get, the more likely it is that you're not going to be able to handle
stressors very well. And it's also going to have a negative impact on your inhibition. Inhibition is your ability to make good decisions. So example, drink alcohol, you're going to have lowered inhibition, make bad decisions when you're drunk. Very obvious, right? Well, when we're sleep deprived and stressed out, we also have a lowered inhibition. And that bad decision might just be falling off your diet.
So we want to manage stress and we want to get enough sleep to make sure that we have better inhibition skills and we can make better decisions for the diet. And improving sleep quality is also going to help increase growth hormone levels, which is going to be a big driver of muscle and recovery. This is going to help us build
muscle tissue. It's going to improve mental focus and it's going to increase strength performance quite literally instantly, because if you get better sleep tonight, tomorrow you are going to train harder in the gym. And there's research to show that. And all of these things can happen from literally getting just one extra hour a night. So if somebody's getting 5:00 to 6:00 on average, we want to get them six to seven on average.
But overall, what we're trying to do is really just improve our state of mind and our well-being because this is directly going to improve our motivation and enthusiasm for the fat loss phase. So as we manage stress and recovery, we are just getting more mentally ready to dive into the diet and that enthusiasm and motivation to diet is going to pay dividends when the client steps into a fat loss phase. The next benefit here is developing consistency and
increasing adherence. So really what we're trying to do here is put all of our, you know, spend some time forming new habits because that's going to be crucial for any diet, whether you're a seasoned Dieter and it's just a new way of dieting. You got to form a new habit that way or you've never died it before and this is all fresh to you. Either way, we are going to be forming new habits, whether it's the way we diet or it's the diet
itself. And habits are way easier to form, especially new ones or difficult ones that challenge your current lifestyle routine in in current habits and systems. Those are way easier to develop when you're at maintenance, when you're in a deficit, you're stressed and you're tired and you don't want to necessarily acquire new habits and try hard and challenge yourself even if
it's necessary. However, when we're at maintenance and we're in a good state of recovery and stress management, it is much easier to form new habits. And we want to capitalize on that aspect during this primer phase. This is also a chance for people to get used to the tracking systems being used. So for us, we are tracking different aspects. For some clients it's tracking macros, for some clients it's tracking habits. But for almost all clients, it
is tracking something. We're going to track weight, we're going to track measurements and progress in the gym. We are going to track biofeedback. And, and some of these things are daily, Some of them for people are it's only weekly. No matter what, there's going to be metrics that need to be tracked because that is part of how you adjust to lead to more
fat loss in the future. But not only that, again, going back to the GPS analogy, I cannot get you where you want to be if I don't know where at you're at right now and I need those starting number. So what we're doing is getting used to tracking. And as a coach, we're gathering data about the client that we can further adjust. And part of this is we're also going to see the inconsistencies, is each individual going into a phallus phase is going to be better at different things.
They're going to be worse at different things. Different things are going to be harder for different individuals. And I want to see those inconsistencies and understand what I'm going to have to lean into and work on most with each person. And throughout this whole process, the communication between the client and the coach is obviously going to improve. And that's really, really crucial when going into a fat loss phase. Standardizing the diet is a big
piece of this as well. And this is going to kind of accumulate as we've gone on because, you know, if you're going to make an adjustment to a diet that's inaccurate, you can't accurately predict what that adjustment is going to do, right? If somebody is very consistent and I know exactly what they're doing with their diet, I'm going to make an adjustment and I can almost guarantee what the result is going to be because I know exactly what they're doing.
So for fat loss, this is both very effective and very efficient because if we standardize the diet, we can make something staples that don't change too often, which makes it the planning easier for the, the client or the the the individual going to the fat loss phase. It also creates standardized metrics or numbers or visuals that we can adjust from. This standardization even applies to before and after pictures.
If you're taking a before picture or a progress picture in a different setting on a different day at a different time, with different lighting every single time, you cannot compare week to week, month to month. But if you take it every Saturday at 7:00 AM with the same lighting after the bathroom, against the same wall, with the same camera, it is going to be very easy to see that you either are or you are not making progress.
And if you are not, we can then go to the standardized diet and know exactly what to tweak in order to progress that forward. So what we're really trying to do with a standardized diet is just make sure we have certain aspects in place that can be adjusted, whether that is calories and macros, or it's the measurements in the progress photos, or it's a literal meal plan. Because maybe some people do better with eating the same things six out of seven days a week. No matter what.
We want a system around these things that is standardized, that can be adjusted in the future. And towards the tail end of this primer phase, we begin to develop this standardization. And then lastly, we are going to establish these baselines. So now that we've done all this work, we have tracked, we have formed habits, we have improved tracking metrics and looking at different biofeedback markers. We're taking progress photos and measurements.
We're building communication with the individual that is going through the fat loss phase. We have baselines that we are going to set as standards to follow. And then future adjustments will happen from these are going to be things like steps, the training volume or the training split and program you're on any programmed cardio potentially, which would be untracked steps.
We don't want to track steps from cardio if it is intentional cardio because your step count should be more reflective of your non exercise activity, so not planned out activity, Total calories in macros, food groups should be mostly Whole Foods, meal timing, frequency, sleep schedule, supplements. Like all these things factor in of like what is the baseline of what is normal so that we can start the fat loss phase with this normality and adjust from them.
And in summary, this, you know, what is this primer phase in kind of conclusion? So you can kind of take the Cliff notes and, and understand why it's so important what a primer phase really is just a short period of time to prime the body and develop consistency. We are forming habits, we are developing consistency, improving adherence, and we are priming the body psychologically, physically and physiologically.
So internally, mentally and physically, the body is getting more recovered and prepared for the diet. And the main purpose is really just that is to develop that consistency and have a baseline to then adjust from so that the fat loss phase goes way more effectively and efficiently. It's easier for the client to adhere to and they are going to be more enthusiastic and motivated by it because the results are also going to be effective quicker.
You're going to see progress faster because your body is ready to adapt to the diet you put them in. And how long should this be? You know, if you're an advanced Dieter, you can sometimes get away with not doing it, but typically an advanced Dieter, somebody who has died in numerous times and maybe they've already checked off some of these boxes before starting, They're going to be looking at
one to two weeks. You know, it's a short period of time to just kind of create some standardization and baselines before going into it. Intermediate Dieter sometimes could get away with one week, but many times we're seeing all the way up to four weeks. And then a beginner Dieter is going to be around 2 to six weeks. You know, one or two, as you can see, is the minimum for just
about anybody. And then 6 is probably as far as you should go. If you're six weeks in and you haven't been able to establish all these things from a primer phase, you need a deeper intervention for the coaching and it shouldn't be preparing for a fat loss phase anymore. You should just be focusing on good nutrition at that point.
And again, we want to avoid skipping this at all costs, but there are times where individuals have checked these boxes prior to approaching us, and in those cases, there might be a case for skipping this. What's next is the progressive
phase. So we'll save this for the next video, but essentially the next video is going to be about how to go through the diet itself, creating an actual timeline, creating the actual deficit, adjusting that diet along the way, and potentially implementing cardio so that you can further that progressive phase by getting leaner and leaner as the progressive phase goes on.