The New Rules for Weight Loss

Welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast with Jerred Moon! In this short but powerful solo episode, Jerred takes on a topic that everyone—from high performers to weekend warriors—cares about: weight loss.

The body hasn’t changed. Biology hasn’t changed.
But the understanding of how our metabolism truly adapts—and how we can work with it, not against it—is evolving.

🔬 The Body Is a Metabolic Adaptation Machine

Your body is designed for one thing: survival. When you push it into a calorie deficit—whether through diet, exercise, or both—it doesn’t just roll over and let go of the fat.

Instead, it adapts.

Your body reduces your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR)—the number of calories it takes to keep you alive. That’s why just cutting calories or working out more doesn’t always lead to long-term results.

🧪 3 Studies That Show How Adaptation Derails Weight Loss

1. Minnesota Starvation Experiment (1944):

   • After 24 weeks of semi-starvation, participants’ BMR dropped by 628 calories/day.

   • Total adaptive reduction? Around 1,500 calories/day—massive.

   • Even at 1,600 calories/day, they hit a fat-loss plateau.

2. The Biggest Loser Study:

   • 30 weeks of extreme exercise and dieting dropped total energy expenditure by nearly 2,000 calories/day.

   • Their bodies fought back hard—even after the show ended, many couldn’t recover their original metabolism.

3. Race Across the USA:

   • Athletes ran 6 marathons/week from coast to coast.

   • Week 1: burning 6,200 calories/day.

   • Final week: down to 5,300 calories/day—a 900-calorie drop!

   • The culprit? Subconscious reduction in non-exercise movement (NEAT).

🔍 NEAT: The Secret Metabolic Factor Most People Ignore

Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is everything outside the gym:

• Walking around

• Tapping your foot

• Doing chores

• Taking the stairs

When you diet and train hard, your body automatically reduces this subconscious movement to save energy. That’s why people plateau even when they’re “doing everything right.”

⚖️ The 3-Pronged Formula for Real, Sustainable Weight Loss

Forget crash diets and brutal 2-a-days. Here’s Jerred’s science-backed strategy:

1. 🔽 Reduce Calories Slightly

• Track what you eat for a week (no changes).

• Cut 5–10% of your daily calories.

  • Example: 3,000 → 2,700 calories/day.

• Don’t starve—just create a small, sustainable deficit.

2. 🔼 Increase Exercise Moderately

• Track your current routine.

• Add one more day per week or extend sessions by 15–20 minutes.

• Keep intensity reasonable (Zone 2–3 heart rate if needed).

3. 🚶‍♂️ Increase Daily Movement (NEAT)

• Track your steps for a baseline.

• Bump your average daily steps up by 2,000–3,000.

  • Example: 6,000 → 9,000 steps/day.

• Walk the dog, pace during phone calls, take movement breaks—whatever keeps you active.

“Your subconscious mind is trying to conserve energy. You have to fight back with movement.” — Jerred Moon

⏳ Hold Steady Past the Adaptation Period

This plan only works if you maintain it for months, not weeks. Once your body adapts to this new baseline, the results stick.

And when that becomes your new normal, you’ve won.
You’ve changed who you are—not just what the scale says.

🎯 Final Thoughts: Why This Works

Most people focus on just diet and exercise—and that’s where they fall short.
This plan focuses on:

• Slight deficit (no starvation)

• Consistent training (no burnout)

• Maximized movement (the overlooked metabolic lever)

By spreading the effort across these 3 pillars, you minimize adaptation and maximize long-term fat loss.

“You’re not just trying to lose weight—you’re becoming someone new. Someone who moves more, eats better, and trains consistently.” — Jerred Moon

🎁 Try It. Track It. Own It.

Want a training plan that supports this approach?

👉 Join Garage Gym Athlete now for a free trial at garagegymathlete.com

And remember…

💣 If you don’t kill comfort, comfort will kill you.

Garage Gym Athlete Workout of the Week

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, just me today, Jerred Moon. And I am going to be talking about weight loss today in this short episode. And the reason I wanna talk about it is because I'm very fascinated with some of the new research that's coming out. Um, and if you're interested in kind of the meta metabolic adaptation I'll be talking about today, we also covered this in episode 1 36, and I, I wanna say that the.

The rules of weight loss are changing to some degree, and I think everyone in some capacity is interested in leaning out or losing weight. Uh, even if you're performance minded, like most everybody who listens to this podcast. Uh, so either you wanna lose weight or at some point in the future you might wanna lose weight or, you know, somebody who wants to lose weight.

I really wanna talk about the rules now. I don't think the rules have actually changed from a biological standpoint. The, the human body is the human body. Uh, but there are things that people are overlooking when they go to lose weight, and that's. What I wanna talk about today. So the first thing that you have to know is your body is a metabolic adaptation machine.

It can adapt to anything. I talked about this in the last podcast when I was talking about how the body can adapt to the sugar diet or carnivore. Anything else your body can adapt. That's what it's been doing, uh, you know, for ever since humans existed, right? Like that's, that's what the body is capable of.

But one thing that people aren't, uh, taking into account is one of the largest ways that you burn calories each and every single day is your basal metabolic rate. So basically just the, the calories your body burns to maintain and keep you alive. So if you have more muscle mass, your body burns more calories to keep those muscles.

Active. Like that's, that's why people say gain muscle when they're trying to lose weight is you just need more muscle. Muscle in general, burns more calories in your BMR, just keeping you alive. You know, other things that keep you alive is respiration and thinking and digestion. All those, all of that.

Will cost calories, right? And a lot of times people, when they're thinking about weight loss, they're really only thinking about how much did I burn in this workout? And then if you're doing a really good job, how many calories am I consuming? Or maybe even a macronutrient breakdown. All of those things are important, but a lot of people are skipping this BMR and not paying attention to your, your total daily energy, energy expenditure and how much your body can adapt to this.

And so, like I said, I've covered this before, but I think it is worth covering again. And the three examples, we have three different studies was there's the Minne Minnesota Starvation Experiment, the Biggest Loser Study and Race across the USA. So I'm gonna go over those real quick, just the highlights of these studies so you understand what I'm talking about.

Um, but the Minnesota starvation experiment was done back in the day. It was 24 weeks of semi starvation and people were doing massive. Semi starvation. So they had like a control period where they're just eating whatever they needed to, to maintain their weight, and then they went into semi starvation.

You can never get this study approved today because we won't do that to humans. Uh, but this wasn't, um, a rat study or anything like that. It was 24 weeks of semi starvation with humans. And as they were doing this, their BMR, their bas, bas basal metabolic rate, so like that. Keeping you alive, what your body burns dropped by 628 calories through the starvation and the total adaptive reduction was about 1500 calories a day.

So even at 1600 calories a day, participants plateaued in. Ultra lean body fat level. So what is, what is all that saying? That's saying that they, they had a baseline and they were, they had a certain BMR and then they cut a bunch of calories and then eventually their body just adapted to it. And one way it adapted it to, it was less BMR.

Now another thing to note is like, if you lose body weight, uh, you know, it'll, your body doesn't have to work as hard. You're not as large. Of a human being, so BMR can drop, but how much this is dropping is quite significant. So what happened is the body just adjusted when we throw new things at our body.

It really doesn't know what's going on, right? Like from a mechanistic standpoint, it's not your conscious mind. Your body is not your conscious mind. So it will try and adapt to make sure that we don't die. That's what your body's gonna do. Now, the one that we did study, uh, cover, we did study, is the second one here is the.

Biggest Loser study 30 weeks. If you're familiar with that show. There was 30 weeks of extreme diet. Uh, they did four to four and a half hours of exercise a day, and their total daily energy expenditure dropped by nearly 2000 calories. Even with aggressive activity, metabolism pulled, pulled back hard. So their body kind of freaked out.

Uh, didn't want to burn more calories, uh, and didn't know what was happening. Honestly, maybe. Maybe the, uh, lizard brain side of your body thinks that you're dying. And the big, my big takeaway from that study when we covered on the podcast back in the day was that, um, they, they're not sure that their metabolism will ever rebound because of how aggressive, uh, the.

The exercise and diet was for them to lose that weight that quickly. Now another thing, uh, just an interesting, I don't know if I'd call it a study, but it was a race across America where they really, um, were watching these people and it, the people actually raced across America. They would do a marathon six days out of the week and they ran from the west coast to the east coast and they saw a 600 to 1000 calorie drop in total daily energy expenditure.

So you might be wondering like, what do you like, what do you mean by that? And. Here's the deal. So pre-race, they were consuming about 3000 calories a day, and then they started the race. Nothing changes with the activity, right? So they start the race and they're running a marathon each and every single day.

These are all the already highly trained athletes, and in week one, they were burning about 6,200 calories per day, and that's what you'd expect when you're running a marathon, right? But then the final week of the race. They were only burning 5,300 calories per day. So do you see there's nor nor nearly a thousand calorie difference that they're burning less same body type and then Well, I mean, they've, they lost some fat free mass.

Their fat free mass went from, um, I don't have it on here. I have how many calories. It was per, per fat free mass. Uh, but ultimately they, their body adapted so much so that there was a thousand. Calorie reduction almost in what their body needed to run a marathon in each and every single day. And it was highly had to do with their neat, the non-exercise activity thermogenesis.

So the things that are happening outside of your body. And so I'm only pointing out these three studies. You can do more research on them because I want you to know that when you throw your body through something like weight, weight loss, the initial response that your body's gonna have is an, is an adaptation to make sure that it doesn't happen and it's not.

Because losing weight is bad for you. Like obviously it's very good for you, it's incredible for your health. It reduces inflammation. You live longer. I mean, everything basically, um, backs up. The reason you should lose weight, but your body's initial response is to con conserve, right? So if you're looking to lose weight, there are really three things that you need to do at the individual level, and it's not just exercise and eat right.

There's a third uh, item here and it's your entire activity level. So going back to these studies, one thing that happens when you start to increase your amount of physical activity is your body starts to do less moving around the non-exercise, uh, activity, right? It doesn't want to do all of those things.

So if you would normally like get up and walk around or whatever, if you didn't work out in a day and you're fairly active. Your subconscious response to that if you do a really hard workout in the morning is to help you conserve calories, so you might. See yourself lounging around a little bit more, or maybe you want to, maybe you're actually tired, so you do wanna lay down or sit down more.

And that's where the problem is, is your body's trying to compensate for what you did. So if you have this really hard workout that you don't normally do, your body is going to subconsciously try to get you to lay down more, be a little bit more lazy. In all honesty, this actually happens. You'll tap less, you'll move your arms less.

You just won't have all of these basic things that you're not really paying attention to. You won't have the desire to do them or to move as much. Your body is actually working against you, but not because it doesn't want you to lose weight, it's just because it doesn't know what's going on. And this adaptation period is stressful and your body's trying to conserve the home, the homeostasis, right?

Like let, let's keep things the, the status quo. Let's keep things how they are. And so if you wanna lose weight. Here are the three things that you need to do. So the first thing is you need to take a baseline across three different things. The first baseline that you're gonna take is, how many calories am I eating on average per day right now?

Just eat your normal diet. You can track this for a day, for a week, whatever. I. Look at your macronutrient breakdown. Look at how many calories you're consuming. Then the second, uh, baseline that you're gonna set is what is my current exercise routine? Maybe it's nothing. Maybe it's three days per week.

Maybe it's six days per week. But track all of these workouts. How many calories are you burning? What's your average heart rate? How long are they? All of these things. You're gonna track that. And let's say it's three days per week, moderate intensity, something like that. Let's say you're burning 300 calories per session, uh, three days per week.

Then the last and final thing, and the real secret to weight loss is your daily movement. So you can do this with a pedometer. So step goal, most everything can track steps. Apple watch, Garmins, whoops. They all can track steps now. And so that is the last thing that you're gonna look at. What's your average over the course of a week?

Is it 3000 steps a day, 5,000, 6,000, 8,000? Now you need to be looking at all three of these things just at a baseline. You need a baseline for these things. Don't try and do anything extra, just live your normal life. And then write it all down. And then what you have to do is a decrease in two increases in all of these areas to lose the weight.

And then you're gonna have to maintain it past the adaptation period. So we're talking about months, not weeks here. And so the first thing that you're gonna do is like, okay, well if I'm eating 3000 calories per day at baseline, I'm gonna cut that to 2,700 calories just to start. For the first couple of weeks I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this 300 calorie reduction, which is 10% reduction.

So you can, you can go from there. If you wanna keep your macronutrient break down the same, that's fine. We don't need to get into all of the macros for weight loss. Okay? Just a reduction. You can do 5%, 10%, you can go up to 20%, but that's a little bit more aggressive. Again, we're in this for the long haul, so you're gonna step one, you're gonna cut the calories.

Maybe by 10%. So going from 3000 calories per day to 2,700. That's a great start. The second prong is if you were exercising three days per week, 300 calories per session, average heart rate was in zone two to zone three. Cool. Let's keep all of that around the same, but then let's bump it to four days per week, one additional day.

So we're, we're not trying to go crazy here. Let's go to one additional day. And so now we're doing four days per week, keeping the workouts about the same, same intensity, everything else that you have been doing. Now, the last, and like I said, probably the most important one that people overlook. Let's say that you're getting 6,000 steps per day, uh, just from moving around, hanging out with your kids, your job, whatever it is.

Now, we're gonna bump that up from 6,000 to whatever you think a realistic and achievable goal would be. Let's say you wanna bump that up to 8,000 or 9,000 calorie or, uh, steps per day. And then, and then you. Stick to that. You make sure that you get it no matter what. If you have to throw in additional walk or just move around a little bit more, whatever you need to walk the dog an extra time, whatever it is.

But those are the three ways, because most people are only focusing. On the diet and the exercise, phenomenal things. They're great for you. You need to do those things. But what you don't know is your subconscious mind is actually working against you. It wants you to move a little bit less. It, it doesn't, you know, there are already mental struggles in on the diet side of things, but those are more like in the conscious mind of like, oh, I want to eat that 'cause it's good, or I don't like this salad, like.

Those are conscious thoughts. Subconsciously your body is trying to adapt and conserve and keep the status quo. So it's having you move less. It's having you not, uh, move around as much. And all of these things tap your feet and your, your hands less. All of these little things that your body is subconsciously doing, you have to fight back.

So if you do these three things, if you're tracking all these things, like, okay, I have a slight caloric deficit, not so much that I'm gonna be starving. 'cause we don't need to do any kind of aggressive dieting. If you're doing the other two things, I'm gonna increase my exercise activity just a little bit.

One additional training session, or maybe I bump each training session up by 15, 20 minutes. Just get a little bit more physical activity. Make sure that you have some strength training in there. And then the last and final step is to make sure that you actually increase your total movement throughout the day, which is gonna be tracked through steps.

Uh, and so going from, if you're, if it's 6,000 average to 7,000, 8,000, 9,000 average, something like that. If you do those three things and then you maintain past the adaptation period, which is gonna be different for everybody, but I would say at least hold that. You can just do that for two months. No, no change in calories.

Uh, once you, after the red reduction, no need to increase more exercise or be more intense. But the biggest thing, making sure you're hitting that step goal each and every single day. If you do those three things, you will be on the fast track to weight loss and not just this like, oh, it's gonna melt off and burn off, and you're gonna do this so fast.

This is a more sustainable approach to keeping it long-term. 'cause what you're doing is building into habits to become a different person that moves more, has a good diet and is also exercising regularly. And then once your body adjusts and that's your new baseline, maybe you're happy with where you're at and you can just kind of maintain those habits.

Or if you need to go one further step down, you're like, okay. I need to, I need to, uh, lose a little bit more. You might not even have to play with the diet as much. Maybe you just play with the steps and you can just play with one, one variable here, because we don't, these starvation diets, you can only cut so much.

And even the literature is saying in the starvation experiment, it's like after a certain point. One, you're, you're not doing something that's healthy anymore. And then two, you, you will plateau. There's only so few calories you can eat and still be healthy. Right? And so it's these other areas and, and it's not just, okay, well I'm gonna exercise 14 times per week, you know, twice per day, every single day.

And they're gonna be really hard sessions. It's like, that's not sustainable. You can't do that. It just focus on your overall activity and how much you move throughout the day on top of those other things. And then that's gonna be the real key to weight loss. So the rules aren't changing here, it's just the realization, um, for people that it's not just about the exercise program and the diet.

It, there's a large portion here, a majority of how your calories are burned each and every single day, and that's. How fit you are, how much lean mass you have, and then ultimately how much you're moving throughout the day. And so if you can track all of those things and make the adjustments I've talked about here, you will be losing weight faster in a sustainable way where your body's actually adapting to this new stimulus and you'll just become a different person with less weight and you most likely won't gain it back if you can maintain these habits.

So that's it for this one. Hopefully you learn something, share it with somebody if you, uh, if they need to hear something like this. But I appreciate all the athletes listening to the podcast really do. Doing our training. Really appreciate each and every single one of you. If you wanna be a part of our training, go to garage gym athlete.com and you can sign up for a free trial.

That's it for this one. Remember, if you don't kill comfort, comfort will kill you.