Dhru Purohit Show
The Top Dos and Don’t When it Comes to Dropping Fat and Building Muscle at the Same Time with Adam Schafer
Wed, 22 Jan 2025
This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Blueland, and Maui Nui. Starting a weight-loss journey and striving for your fittest year yet isn’t always easy. It’s natural to feel like you’re the only one struggling to stay on track, but it can be reassuring to know that even fitness experts face similar challenges. Today’s guest is a fitness expert who’s here to share his relatable journey of losing weight, building muscle, and getting back on track—proving that progress is achievable for all of us. Today on The Dhru Purohit Show, Dhru sits down with Adam Schafer, Co-founder of Mind Pump. Adam shares the top dos and don’ts he’s learned from his journey to lose weight and build muscle. He highlights the basics everyone should know, how they shaped his own weight-loss journey, and how to harness metabolic flexibility. Adam also emphasizes that it’s never too late to get fitter and healthier, reminding us that small, consistent steps can lead to incredible transformations in every aspect of life. Adam Schafer, an IFBB pro bodybuilder and founding member of Mind Pump Media, joins us today as a co-host of the popular Mind Pump podcast. He managed some of the largest fitness clubs in the Bay Area and, along the way, collected eight national certifications, and a pro card in bodybuilding. In this episode, Dhru and Adam dive into: Top dos and don’ts when you are trying to lose weight (00:36) The most crucial basics for the average person (15:41) How to appropriately track protein (22:02) Dhru's health journey (28:45) Why it's never too late (35:08) Behaviors that allow metabolic flexibility (41:01) Mindfulness and mindset shifts that improve how you feel (48:30) Overcoming discouragement from unrealistic goals (51:48) Ginny MacColl, the Oldest American Ninja Warrior (01:00:30) How Adam trained his wife and what she discovered (01:03:48) Resources and recommendations (01:07:57) Also mentioned in this episode: The Step By Step Longevity Protocol this 72 Year Old Followed to Reverse Her Osteopenia, Build Muscle, and Become the Oldest American Ninja Warrior For more on Adam and Mind Pump, follow them on Instagram, X/Twitter, Apple Podcast, TikTok, YouTube, and their Website. This episode is brought to you by Momentous, Blueland, and Maui Nui. Optimize your energy and mental clarity with the purest form of creatine made by and used by the best. Go to livemomentous.com and enter promo code DHRU to get 20% off any order. Get a clean home while keeping a clean planet with Blueland. Right now, get 15% off your first order by going to blueland.com/dhru. Right now, Maui Nui Venison is offering my community 15% off your first purchase. Just go to mauinuivenison.com/DHRU or enter the code DHRU at check out to get 20% off and up your high-quality protein today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the top dos and don'ts for losing fat and building muscle?
Adam, welcome to the podcast. You know, you've been on this intense journey for anybody following your story of building muscle and losing fat, both at the same time. And for my audience who is interested in the same thing, and many of them want to live their fittest year ever.
Let's talk about some of those top do's and don'ts that you've learned in your own journey that can inspire their own 30-day program or protocol. I want to start off with the first one. Maybe give us a don't that you experience yourself on your own journey.
Well, I think if anybody that's watched the last three months I've been doing this, I made a lot of mistakes, I think. I think maybe that's probably what people enjoyed was it was relatable. I was honest and authentic, and I just kind of, you know, I didn't have a major plan. I had a goal in mind of losing as much body fat as I could, building as much muscle.
But I kind of went as I felt and just communicated what was going on. Probably one of the first mistakes or pitfalls I had on the second month, I really didn't move body fat percentage. I was really frustrated with that. The goal was to lean out more. I added a little bit of muscle, so it wasn't completely at loss or terrible, but I didn't lose any more body fat.
and what i communicated to the audience was i had three weeks in a row where i had like i had a vacation i had a birthday and then we had this like race car thing that i did with my wife so basically three weeks out of the four weeks i was traveling you know so virtually you know a third or more of the days were in hotels flying in airplanes airports But I still was eating good.
I didn't eat off the plan per se. Like I was still going through Chipotle and getting chicken rice bowls and, you know, staying away from the desserts and alcohol. So I was still I would consider myself eating really good. And I was tracking. tracking when you're traveling and in the airport is a guesstimation, right?
Like it's not, I didn't carry my scale with me and I wasn't, you know, and I wasn't getting back to the cook and say, did you use any butter or oil in this stuff? You know? So I was looking at it going, okay, that's probably six ounces of that. That's four. And I like to think that I'm, I'm pretty good at that since I did that competitively. But when the results came in,
and I didn't lean out, what that told me was my estimations were off, and not just a little off. They were off enough for me actually to build muscle, which means I had to have been in a calorie surplus more often than I was in a deficit. And based off of my tracking, I thought I was at a consistent 500 to a thousand calorie deficit. So I wasn't just a little off.
I was off by hundreds, maybe a thousand calories on some days, which was, it was mind blowing a bit, but when I really think about it, it wasn't because in the past when I am competitively tracking and trying to lean out like that aggressively, I just don't eat out like that. Like in my competitive days, I carried Tupper wherever I went just so there wasn't room for error.
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Chapter 2: What are the crucial basics for the average person?
But when you start stringing in the amount of days that I was traveling in that short period of time, it's a quick recipe for over-consuming, even if it's healthy food and can easily sell your progress. Now, that's also okay.
if that happens but what happens to people that are trying to do this on their own journey is they get discouraged by that and that really tends to spiral something that was this is what i communicated on that youtube was i was frustrated bummed but aware of what happened so i explained to the audience that how easily this could happen to even somebody with my experience
And so the attitude you need to have is one, don't be discouraged. Don't beat yourself up. That's just, I mean, you traveled a lot. I was in airports. I was taking vacation. I wasn't making my meals. And so that's a good chance that that could happen. And then if I don't want those results, then I need to make a better effort at making more of my meals.
I think that's important for people to understand that, not necessarily because you can never eat out at an airport. You can never eat out at a restaurant and make good choices, but more so because
When you feel like you're putting that much effort into not eating the dessert and not over-consuming and hitting your workouts, and then you get those type of results back, it can be really discouraging. And that tends to send the average person spiraling out of control because then they have the attitude of, well, F it. I made all this sacrifice. I never missed the gym.
And then that's all I got for my results. I mean, it's like showing up to a job for a month and then your paycheck is nothing what you expected it or you didn't get paid at all, right? Or you owed money. How often do you keep doing that job? You say, forget it. I don't want to do this anymore. So the average person, I think that is working towards their goals.
And that happens to them many times that those type of results will happen. And then they get discouraged and then they quit and give up or they swing the other direction and just say, oh, forget it. Like, why make all these sacrifices? I could have just ate whatever I wanted and got darn near the same results.
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Chapter 3: How should you track your protein intake effectively?
You know, I shared with you before we started recording that you had this fantastic quote from one of your videos on Mind Pump TV. And you said, you know, the fitness industry is often giving advice for the 5%. And we forget the 95% of the people that are out there that just want to be a little bit better or have a goal that's not like something crazy precise, which nothing wrong with that.
right? You actually are very fit just looking at you here, but also you showing us on your YouTube channel, you're really fit and you went on an intense journey.
But the takeaway from what I'm getting from watching that, hearing you talk about it, and even hearing what you're saying here is that if anybody's listening here and they do want to lose some fat and they want to build muscle, one surefire way to derail your goals is that if all of your meals are being eaten out of the home, that's going to be really hard. Very hard.
If maybe 75% of your meals are being eaten out of the home, that's a little less hard. If 50%, that's better. 25%, you get lower and lower to the degree that the more meals that you can make and control and you got to use some tools like maybe meal planning to be able to do that, the more likely it is that you're going to be able to hit your goal.
And just for everybody who's listening, yes, you can overeat on even healthy food and end up gaining weight.
Yes. And really, it's also having realistic expectations from what you put in. If it was a client, like let's say I was training me and me was a client, not myself. The conversation I would have with that client is like, hey, great job. We still built a few pounds of muscle. We didn't lose any body fat like we wanted to. But hey, you ate out, you know.
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Chapter 4: Why is it never too late to start a fitness journey?
three of the four weeks you were traveling and eating out and we didn't put on, put on any fat. So that's a really good sign. And we at least built a little bit of muscles. That's good because that means you lifted weights and you make good choices.
We just over-consumed having just realistic expectations to the results where people are really get spiral out of control is when they have this expectation of
that they're going to see this huge swing or change and they feel like they put all this effort in because they're running around the airport looking for the only healthy place to eat or they're getting up extra early to make it to the gym because they don't want to miss that workout, but they're still doing a lot of the eating out and traveling.
And so then they expect they're going to see a greater return and then they don't. And so the conversation really is like, it's not bad or you didn't do something per se wrong. We definitely made it difficult for to see great change in a single month. So that's okay. Next month, we'll be more consistent with that. And to address the 5% thing, because that's a major pet peeve of mine.
A lot of the success that MindPump has had has been on not getting caught up in the noise of our peers.
it's easy to, it's easy to allow the YouTube kid who likes to do the voiceover video and tear apart something we say and try and use studies to argue a point that we're making and, you know, get into this pissing contest between other professionals on who's smarter, who knows more, who can tout more studies than the other person.
Meanwhile, we're losing the majority and all we're doing is appealing to this small percentage of radical fitness people that do read all the studies that want to know all the nuances and to get that extra 1%. But the reality is that's not most people. And that's not really what most of us got in this business to help.
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Chapter 5: What behaviors promote metabolic flexibility?
Like, I mean, I enjoyed training some competitors and the elite people that want to get to the next crazy level, but that's not what filled my bucket, like fill my bucket. And what I did more than anything else was trained normal people, people that said things like, Adam, I don't like to work out. Yeah. My doctor told me I had to be here.
Or I know that I want to be able to play with my kids and my grandkids, and so I'm here. But I don't like this. I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm here. That's what I like to train. Those are the people I want to help.
And for those people, a lot of the stuff that you hear online and a lot of the things that a lot of our peers are arguing over, all it does is end up confusing them or making it more difficult when there's bigger rocks for those people to focus on.
And it's unfortunate that we do allow some of us to get into these pissing contests of who's smarter in the space versus really trying to bring everybody up and help the majority. So I think we do a pretty good job of communicating that. But I know sometimes we can get dragged into those battles with other peers on who's smarter, who knows more in the fitness space.
Well, let's talk about doubling down on some of those rocks, the ones that significantly move the needle forward. You were talking about the average person.
When I talk to my podcast audience, which is a lot of individuals right around my age, maybe somewhere between 35 and 55 is the biggest concentration, but we have a lot of people, especially women in the 60 to 70 age group as well too, 50 to 60. And when I hear their goals and what their version of their fittest year is,
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Chapter 6: How can mindfulness and mindset shifts improve your fitness journey?
Yet looks like, especially when they think about 2025, it's, Hey, I want to lose five to 10 pounds. And I'd love, you know, especially for a lot of my audience, that's not former in competing. Maybe he doesn't even have a history of resistance training. They're like, I would love now that I know the importance of muscle, I would love to at least build five pounds of muscle. Yeah. Right. Add that.
So when you're thinking about your own journey and some of the things that have worked for you, obviously, you know, some of the basics, so many of the basics, what would be those same, what would be the top things that you'd be sharing with our audience? Who is that average person that's coming in with those? For sure. This episode is brought to you by Momentous Creatine.
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Chapter 7: How can you overcome discouragement from unrealistic fitness goals?
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So let's talk about the 20 plus years I've been doing this. By now, if I'm not to the thousands, I'm definitely in the high of hundreds of clients that I've trained and I've helped.
99% of them, when they first get started, one of the first things that I would do before I tell them how to eat or tell them what to do, I actually always ask people to just track and pay attention to what you're doing. So if you eat a Snickers bar every single day, I want you to do that. If you have a glass of wine at dinner every night, I want you to do that.
All I want to do is I just want to see what a normal week or two of eating looks like for you, and then we're going to make these subtle tweaks along the way. Now, from all the years or decades of doing that and the hundreds of people, almost all of them were under-eating protein, grossly, like way under-eating protein, especially my female clients. Men too, but especially my female clients.
I mean, we're talking – 30 to 60 grams of protein on the high end for most clients. And when you ask most of them, do you eat a lot of protein? They say yes. Because what happens, they go, well, I have eggs for breakfast. I have a turkey sandwich for lunch. And then we normally have a chicken stir fry or something for dinner. So I eat a lot of
protein and in their head there that's how they attribute a high protein diet well the two eggs was 14 grams at most maybe 12 12 to 14 grams the turkey sandwich only has a large subway sandwich or large togos is four ounces of meat so there's 20 grams of protein right there and then let's just say they eat a giant piece of chicken eight ounces which is a lot for a female now she's got 35 grams so 35 12 what are we at
50, 60 grams of protein. And that's saying they, every meal they had a, what they think is like a protein. So that is the first thing. And why that is so important is if we're, if I'm going to get this person to strength train, that's the first good step of like building a metabolism, building strength.
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Chapter 8: What insights did Ginny MacColl gain as the oldest American Ninja Warrior?
And most people are probably listening to your positive know that that's a good idea to lift weights, to get strong, to build, build muscle. But if you don't give it the building blocks, then what that weight training starts to look like, it starts to look like just movement and activity, which in it by itself is not a bad thing. That's good. I mean, that's a good thing. It's movement.
You're going to burn calories, going to stretch the muscles out, work on range of motion, nothing wrong with that. But the most beneficial thing from that is the muscle that we want to build from that. And you lifting weights sends the signal, but the protein and the calories that you consume, that's what goes repairs and builds that muscle.
So we want to first send the signal, but we got to make sure we're getting adequate protein. And what a lot of people don't understand about protein, what makes it unique out of the macronutrients is it's not like carbs and fat and calories where you look at your week and then you take an average and go, oh, I average this many calories or I average many grams of fat.
Like protein, if you miss a protein day, you miss that protein day. So if you had a really low day of 30 and then the next day you have 200, it's not the average of the two. Once, if your body didn't get it that day, it didn't get it that day. And if you send a signal to build muscle and it didn't have the adequate nutrition to build that muscle, it ain't going to go build that muscle.
So that's the number one. So number one, when I get a client, I look at their diet. And so the common things grossly under eating protein, many times we're not getting enough fiber. Most times we're eating too much carbohydrates or sugar. Uh, and a lot of times with my women, we would be under on healthy fats. Now, what I don't want to do is throw the whole kitchen sink at them.
That's why it's like protein first. Cause I know if I go after protein, I get them to do that. We'll take care of a lot of other things. Proteins, uh, most satiating macronutrient. And so a lot of times my clients that over consume on the sugar, the carbs, all the extra calories, just by shifting them of focusing on protein automatically starts to carve some of that without me telling it.
And there's, There's a part of that that's so important. We as humans have this rebellious nature. So if you tell a client, you can't do this, you can't have that, even if they have the discipline to resist the cookie or resist the thing, And inside, there's a part of them that's having this internal conversation of, I can't, I can't, I can't.
And they want to rebel against that versus me not ever saying, you can't have that cookie. Instead saying, Susan, what I need you to do is you need to hit 130 grams of protein every day. Just go get that. Well, what about... My wine. Don't worry about that right now. All I care about, go get that protein. Don't miss just, let's just focus on that.
And then we'll, we'll talk about the other stuff later. And a lot of times I look at you all kind of sideways. Like he didn't tell me I can't have my wine. He didn't say anything about that cookie or this or that, but I know that, I know what happens when she focuses on hitting that 130 grams of protein every day. I know those things just start to fall off to the side.
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