How To Handle Pizza, Work Trips, And Post-Workout Hunger
Most men do not lose their progress in their own kitchen. They lose it when pizza lands on the counter, when the workout leaves them starving two hours later, and when a work trip turns eating into whatever is closest. This live coaching session covers the strategies that handle all three, plus the five pound range that keeps the weight off once you get it off.
Every Wednesday night Coach Brian runs a live roundtable for the men inside The Call To Rise. This one was good enough to release as an episode. It covers pizza nights and work trips. It covers the workout that leaves you starving and the scale that stops moving.
Two Numbers Before Anything Else
Most men want a program. What they need first is repetition on two numbers.
Eat 1,800 calories or less. Get 10,000 steps or more. Coach Brian's position on this is simple. When a man hits those two things day after day, he almost always loses weight.
One of the men on the call had the proof in hand. He weighed 230 the morning he first reached out to Coach Brian. Three or four weeks later he stepped on the scale at 220. No complicated plan. Two numbers, repeated.
The habits matter more than the plan wrapped around them. Coach Brian has watched this for over 20 years. Hand a man a 12-week program and three weeks in he has already stopped. So the question every day is not whether the session was optimal. It is whether you checked the box. Did you get to the gym, lift with intention, hit the muscle groups, and move on.
Sustainability is the single most important piece of any training or nutrition plan. A plan you keep doing beats a better plan you quit.
Drop The Word Cheat
Outside of video games, cheat carries a bad meaning in English. A cheater is a cheater. That word does not belong anywhere near your food.
Coach Brian has never told a man he cannot eat something. You can eat whatever you want. The real question is what the next best thing to do in this situation is.
Years ago a client texted him on a Sunday asking about a donut. He did not say yes or no. He asked questions. What kind. How much of it do you need to feel satisfied. Do you need the whole thing. Half. A bite. Could you share it. By the end of the questions she had talked herself out of it on her own.
That is the method. A donut almost never gets bought. It arrives out of nowhere. Someone brings a box to church or to a morning meeting. Everyone reaches for one. So you reach for one too. You are responding to the room. The questions slow that down long enough for you to decide.
Then ask the follow-up question. What would fulfill the reward here. Food as a reward is fine when there is some control around it.
Build A Strategy Before The Food Arrives
Pizza is going to land at your house one way or another. So is ice cream. So is a work dinner. Men who keep losing fat have already decided what they do when it happens.
The pizza strategy
Pizza is a lot of carbohydrate, fatty meat, fatty cheese, and a lot of calories fast. Quantify it in your head before the first slice. A normal slice averages 300 to 400 calories, so four or five slices is most of a day.
Eat first. A chicken salad or something like it before the pizza arrives means you take two slices instead of five. Thin crust cuts some of the crust calories, so that choice works in your favor too.
Then handle the rest of it. Walk for an hour after. Or hold the carbs down for the next 18 hours and lean on protein and vegetables until it balances out.
The ice cream strategy
The little boy inside screams for a large with everything on it. Order the small. Two small complementary flavors beat one big scoop, and butter pecan with pistachio or chocolate cookie dough with chocolate peanut butter runs about 400 to 500 calories. That is a number you can make room for.
The event day strategy
When you know a big meal is coming, plan the calories for it instead of hoping. If a holiday or a family celebration is going to take 1,000 or 1,500 calories, eat twice that day and make the other meal a protein and vegetable combination that keeps you full enough to walk in without being famished.
The day after
One night does not undo a month. Delay the first meal the next day. Keep the calories lower. Go protein and vegetables. Drink water. Get a good lift in. Once you have a repeatable playbook, one event cannot crater you. You already know what to do around it.
Eat Your Carbs Around Your Training
A lot of men come off a hard workout and eat everything in sight for the next two hours. That is a fuel problem.
Think about a car. Carbohydrates get stored in your muscles as glycogen, and that is the gasoline you burn to lift. The heavier you go and the more muscle groups you hit, the more of that tank you drain. The bigger the drain, the bigger the hunger.
Two things fix it.
First, decide whether the session needs fuel. Ask yourself whether you need energy for this workout or can go do it without eating first. On a normal lift you can walk in and train. Eat after. A session with more juice in it earns a quick carbohydrate about 15 minutes out. Honey works. So does a chewy granola bar or a graham cracker. That lifts blood sugar and gives you energy floating in the blood to use, so you are not pulling it all out of the tank.
Second, plan the meal that comes after. You drive the car, then you stop and fill it back up. A real refuel meal around 800 calories with 60 to 70 grams of carbohydrate carries most men straight through to dinner without raiding the kitchen.
There is also the honest version of this conversation. If a run leaves you so hungry that you eat back more than you burned, walk instead for a while. Get the food handled first, then add the intensity back.
Where the carbs go
Starchy carbs go around your activity. Protein and fibrous carbs go in the hours when you are not active. Most men do not need anything during the session at all. Eat after.
Same total, different placement. Say you eat 160 grams of carbohydrate across four meals. Splitting that evenly at 40 grams a meal is fine on paper. Putting about 100 of those grams around your workout in the middle of the day, 20 in the morning, and 40 at dinner works better in your body.
Placement is also why a light pre-workout meal can leave you starving. Two corn tortillas at roughly 50 calories each with a third of a pound of turkey is 35 to 40 grams of protein and almost nothing else. It is not filling. Add rice, add beans, or add a piece of fruit before you train, and pack two more for after.
Stock The House So The Right Choice Is The Easy One
Most of this comes down to what is already in your kitchen. One warehouse store run covers a week.
- Rotisserie chicken. Grab one or two and pick off them. Breast or thigh matters less than people think, and a 50/50 split is fine.
- Pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs.
- Frozen grilled chicken strips or pre-cooked chicken.
- Canned or pouched tuna and chicken that live in the pantry until you need them.
- Bagged or boxed greens, plus frozen vegetables.
- Pre-cooked rice or quinoa that microwaves in a couple of minutes.
- Individual hummus or guacamole cups.
- Greek yogurt and cottage cheese in the big tubs.
- Fruit and vegetables, and as little as possible in colorful packaging.
Coach Brian's go-to when he is in a pinch is two cans of tuna packed in water rather than oil. Add two cans of green beans. Mix cottage cheese in as the cream instead of a pile of mayonnaise. Then season it hard. Mustard. Relish. Garlic powder. Red pepper flakes. Rosemary. Seasoning is what makes a lean meal something you will eat twice.
Nuts are the quiet one. A pistachio or an almond runs about seven calories. One or ten is nothing. A handful you keep going back to is a meal.
The dip stab method
Dressing is where a clean salad turns into a heavy one. Put the higher calorie dressing on the side. Dip the fork, stab the food, then eat. You get dressing in every bite and use about half of what is in the container.
Read the label the same way you would read any other. Look at the calories in a tablespoon. Anything over 50 multiplies fast if you are pouring. Plenty of options sit at zero to 20.
Two more options most men have never tried. Sprinkle a dry ranch seasoning packet over a wet salad, so chopped tomatoes, cucumbers, and washed spinach carry the flavor without the cream. Or stir that same seasoning into Greek yogurt or cottage cheese and get a dressing that brings protein with it.
Learn What Is In Your Food
Tracking is not the goal. Understanding is the goal.
Men learn about protein and carbs and fat in eighth grade health class. Then they never use it, because someone else is doing the cooking. Years later you are the one shopping and cooking and none of that knowledge is there. Logging your food for a stretch puts it back.
The objections are all answerable. You do not have to weigh and measure everything. You do not have to buy a food scale. Look at the package, see it holds four servings, divide it into four equal parts by eye, and log four ounces out of sixteen. That is close enough to teach you something.
It takes about two weeks to get the hang of it. Do it for four weeks, or for the rest of the 100 days, and it transfers to the rest of your life.
If logging genuinely is not going to happen, there is a lower bar that still works. Send a photo of everything you eat to your coach. It keeps you honest and it still generates feedback.
And when progress stalls, there are always breadcrumbs. A stall is almost never a broken metabolism. It is almost always more calories going in than the man realized. Start there before you start blaming your body.
The Five Pound Range
Here is the math that catches men who feel like they eat fine.
A quarter pound a week is about a pound a month. You will never notice a pound. A year of that is 12 pounds. Two years of that is 25. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no pull back toward the middle.
So build the pull back in. Pick a five pound range and live inside it. When the scale hits the top of that range, you knock it off. Whatever you have been getting away with, you tighten up for about a week. The extra ice cream. The pizza. The vegetables you stopped eating. Pay closer attention. Walk more. Skip a meal. The scale comes back to the middle and you stop worrying about it.
Coach Brian holds himself to the same standard. He weighed 190.2 in August 2019. He weighed 189.2 a week after a trip to Peru more than six years later. He has gone over 200 on purpose during a winter bulk and down into the 183 to 185 range when he wanted to look a certain way with his shirt off. The median across all of it sits right around 190. Holding that takes no real work now.
That is the whole point of the range. You learn the skills once, and then you live.
Do Not Wait Until You Are Hungry
One more habit from the call. Coach Brian does not wait until he is hungry to eat. He eats when it makes sense to put food in his mouth, because he knows when the next meal is coming.
Look at your own pattern over the last 10 or 20 years. Something in the morning. Something midday. Often something in the afternoon. Something at night. That pattern is stable, and skipping one of those slots without a plan is what turns into raiding the kitchen while dinner is still cooking.
So plan around your calendar. If a meeting sits right where you would normally eat, make the meal before it bigger. Closer to 600 or 800 calories carries you to the other side.
The Brotherhood Piece
The other thing this call does is harder to put in a nutrition plan.
If you are a man over 40, there is a decent chance your social connection outside of your family and your job is close to nothing. That is a health variable, not a soft one. The roundtable exists partly for that reason.
It is also where the accountability gets real. On this call the group set up a week-long weigh-in challenge, complete with trash talk and a shake on it. Screenshots in the group chat. Weigh in the next morning, weigh in again the following Wednesday. Men push each other harder than a plan ever will.
That is what the brotherhood is about. Camaraderie, togetherness, and actual humans connecting with people.
Action Steps
- Set your two numbers for the next seven days. 1,800 calories or less. 10,000 steps or more.
- Write your pizza strategy and your ice cream strategy before either one arrives.
- Move your starchy carbs to the hours around your training and hold protein and fibrous carbs everywhere else.
- Do one warehouse store run and stock rotisserie chicken, eggs, canned fish, greens, frozen vegetables, and cottage cheese.
- Log your food for two weeks, or send a photo of every meal to someone who will look at it.
- Pick your five pound range and write down the number at the top of it.
- Find the men who will push you. Ask one of them to weigh in with you next Wednesday.
The Call To Rise
The Call To Rise is a 100-day Fat Loss Challenge designed for driven men ready to get back to a healthy body, boost their energy, and lead as a powerful man.
If you are struggling with some form of chronic illness such as high blood pressure, cholesterol or even Type 2 Diabetes - this program is designed for you too.
Through a proven system of strength training, personalized nutrition, and real accountability, most men lose 20 plus pounds and rebuild the confidence that comes with it and even improve chronic illness issues. It's more than a fitness program, it's a body transformation experience with a Brotherhood of like-minded men committed to showing up, leveling up, and leading in a body they are excited about.
This is your wake-up call to rise.
www.thecalltorise.com
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the two daily numbers Coach Brian starts men on?
Eat 1,800 calories or less and get 10,000 steps or more. He tells the group that when a man hits those two things day after day, he almost always loses weight.
Should I have a cheat day?
Coach Brian does not use the word cheat, because it carries a bad meaning and turns eating into a rule you broke. You can eat whatever you want. The question is what the next best thing to do in that situation is.
How do I handle pizza without stalling my progress?
Decide before it arrives. Eat a chicken salad or something like it first so you take two slices instead of five, since a normal slice averages 300 to 400 calories. Then walk after, or hold your carbs down at the next meals and lean on protein and vegetables.
Why am I so hungry after a workout?
Harder sessions burn more and drain the stored carbohydrate in your muscles, so hunger climbs. Eat a quick carbohydrate about 15 minutes before a hard session and plan the meal that comes after it. If you keep eating back more than you burned, walk instead of run for a while.
When should I eat my carbs?
Put starchy carbs around your activity and lean on protein and fibrous carbs when you are not active. If you eat 160 grams of carbohydrate in a day, about 100 of those work best around your workout, with 20 in the morning and 40 at night.
Do I have to track my food to lose fat?
No, but tracking teaches you what is in your food, and that knowledge transfers for life. It takes about two weeks to get the hang of, and you do not need a food scale. Divide a package into equal portions by eye and log it that way.
How do I keep the weight off once I lose it?
Pick a five pound range and live inside it. When the scale reaches the top of the range, tighten up for about a week by paying closer attention, walking more, or skipping a meal, and it comes back to the middle.
What is the Call To Rise program?
The Call To Rise is a 100-day fat loss challenge built around strength training, personalized nutrition, and real accountability. Most men lose 20 plus pounds and rebuild the confidence that comes with it.
