 One of the biggest misconceptions in health and fitness is the following. Believe it or not, you can eat more and get leaner, and you can also eat less and get fatter. In fact, this happens all the time. People try to lose weight, they just eat less, they do it wrong, they end up fatter. Today's episode, we're going to explain how this happens. You can't wait for that to get clipped, clipped, and everybody smash it. Yeah, of course. You're so pissed. Of course. How can you defy the law-throwing dynamics now? How dare you? I'm going to break it down. I'm going to break it down. I first have to tell a story. I remember when I experienced this as a trainer, myself, for myself, not for my clients, it was for myself. It was one of the first times that I was trying to really get super, super lean. So I was never like overweight, I always worked out, but I was trying to get like super ripped at one point. And what I did is I cut my calories, did a bunch of cardio, which is what people typically do. This is the wrong approach. This is what I did though, this is what I thought you're supposed to do. Did a bunch of cardio, cut my calories, lost weight on the scale. And I had one of my friends who was a trainer at the time, who worked for me, testing my body fat percentage with calipers. And I'll never forget, I lost, it was a relatively significant number on the scales, like eight pounds or something like that on the scale. So I lost eight pounds. I'm like, oh my God, I'm getting leaner. It's totally working. This is awesome. Can you come test my body fat? He came and tested my body fat and I went up almost a percent. Now I thought for sure I was convinced you tested my body fat wrong. You're doing it wrong. Do it again. Came back the same. I had someone else test me, came back the same. I'm like, how is this even possible? And at the time I had a trainer working for me. It was highly educated. And I sat down with him and I said, do you think that there's so much user error on this body fat caliper that that it could read so wrong that I lost eight pounds and gained body fat? And he goes, no, not necessarily. I said, what do you mean? He goes, if you lost muscle, then you're going to be fatter. And I said, what? And then he said the following. And this, of course, blew my mind. It's totally true. Body fat percentage, which is what matters, not your total body fat, the percentage that matters. Body fat percentage is a percentage of your overall body weight. And what I had done because my approach was wrong, which is what lots of people do, especially girls, women. That's what they do when they try to lose weight. Overdoes the cardio, just drastically, drastically under eats. They end up losing muscle. And now they're left with the same total body fat, but on a smaller frame. Your body fat percentage just went up. In other words, 10 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound person is less, sorry, is more in terms of body fat percentage than 10 pounds of body fat on a 200 pound person. It's not about the total body, body fat, it's about the percentage. And that's just one of the ways that could happen. If you're interested, just click on the link at the top of the description below. All right, back to the show. You know, there's a story I don't think I've ever shared on this podcast before that this conversation reminds me of. And this happened early in my career. So I'm in my early twenties. I've got a client. She's mid thirties, I'd say mid, mid to late thirties. I think she was absolute sweetheart, about a hundred pounds overweight. And I had her for, I had her for a long time. And at this point, we're probably, I don't know, two months into training and I had put her on a diet and I've been training. I'm training her three times a week and we're not, we're not losing weight at all. And this, at this point in my career is, I mean, you've never heard of reverse dieting. Um, you, that we're not, that's not familiar. Like law, three, nine, max is all that we're taught as trainers and yeah, cut calories. And I have her on this like super low calorie diet. And I remember her telling me that's a lot of food. I'm like a lot of food is like hardly eating calories. I'm cutting calories, but she's like, no, I normally eat less than that. And I remember at this point in my career, like, I think she, she has to be lying to me. She's sitting across from me. She's a hundred pounds overweight. She's not a little petite little thing. And she's telling me she's eating like 1,100 calories and she's not losing any weight and she's not going anywhere to the point where I went to her house. Like I showed up at her house. I wanted to see what was in her cupboards and like, and as I go through her cupboards, I don't see anything that's like jumps out at me that, okay, she's binging on this or this shouldn't be in there. Like, unless she was drinking all of oil straight out of the bottle, everything in the house was pretty solid. We should have been okay. And then I remember continuing on, still not seeing progress with the, where the calories are. And then it got to a point again where I still, she's got to be lying to me. And I'm like, every time you put anything in your mouth, I want a picture of it. And then she started like snapping photos of it and then sending to me. And I remember looking at it like, this is like nothing. It made no, it made zero sense to me at that time. I had no idea and it wasn't till, and I felt terrible because I actually never helped this girl. I had a lot of, I could never solve at this point in my career at this age. I'm just, that's such a mystery. Well, because we were taught like, and you still see this permeates the fitness space. Like my point I made when I said, watch when that gets clipped, there's going to be trainers that will try and there'll be people that will try and tear apart what Sal said and says, oh, that's not scientific. And the law of thermodynamics calories in versus calories out. And that's what we're all taught. And so you think, how is this possible? Well, it's, it's very possible if this, if this girl, this one that I'm talking about has been yo-yo dieting her entire life and over time has slowed her metabolism down through cutting calories, cutting calories, cutting calories, cutting calories, doing, if she ever does any sort of exercise, it's cardio cardio and less calories and less calories. And so she's got herself in this spot where she has been, she's metabolically adapted to only eating 1,100 calories and yet still being 100 pounds overweight. What the hell do you do as a trainer? And at that point in my career, I didn't know what to do. I had no idea. I didn't know what a reverse diet was. I didn't know what we should have done to help build her metabolism. I only knew the tools I had, which at that time was, oh, cut calories, push her harder. And I had already tried all that. You know what's crazy about this is that we now, by the way, all of us experience this as trainers. Uh, and at one point, Adam, I want you to tell a story of the challenge you did with your trainers and how angry they were when they found out that they lost weight, but we now have studies that prove what we're talking about. Now, first off, let's talk about the law of thermodynamics. This is a law of physics. And what that means is if you want to lose weight, you take in less calories and you burn, you want to gain weight, you take in more calories and burn it. And the reason why it's a law of thermodynamics is energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It just gets turned into something else. So if there's more calories, which is energy coming in, then you're burning, those extra calories have to be stored as something or turned into something. They don't just disappear. And if you're taking the less calories and you're burning, your body has to get those calories from somewhere. So it's going to start to burn some tissue. So that's true. Now here's the part where everybody gets confused. The calories out part of the equation can vary radically and not just because of activity. Everybody thinks it's just activity. Move more, burn more, move less, burn less. Now the metabolism, human or mammalian metabolism in particular is extremely complex. I'll bring up two studies right now that have been quoted on the show many times. You can look them up yourself. We'll put up the links for them. One of them is a, was a study done and I quoted this one in my book on the, on modern hunter-gatherers. So hunter-gatherers are people who live the way that humans lived a hundred thousand years ago. So no modern agriculture. They don't grow crops. They don't have electricity. They literally hunt and gather. Okay. So these people that's called the hot, they're called the Hodgson tribe of Northern Tanzania. They live the way we all lived a hundred thousand years ago. They, if they want to eat meat, which they have to, because it's calorically dense, they have to track it. Then they have to wound it. Then they have to run after it until the animal collapses. This is how humans hunt, because we can actually out trek most animals. A lot of people don't know this about humans, but we can do this. So animal gets exhausted and eventually they can sprint towards the animal, take it down or it collapses. Then they bring it all the way back. And this is usually like a 20, 30 mile process. Gathering is also very active. They don't sit down and rest like we do. They have what's called active sitting positions, like they sit in a squat for the most part. They don't sit on couches. They don't have electronics. And so what scientists did is they went down there and through at the time, and I think it's still true to this day, the most sophisticated technology at measuring metabolism. How many calories are these people burning every single day? Now, the theory was they're going to be burning a lot of calories. They're running after animals. They're gathering activity. That's what you would assume. They have to, right? Here's what came back from the data and it blew everybody's minds. But if you, if you understand evolution, it makes perfect sense. These hot set tribes people burned roughly the same calories as the average Western couch potato. Now you might think to yourself, that makes no sense. The average Western couch potato gets up, drives the work, sits at a desk, drives home, sits at the dinner table, sits on the couch. The hot set tribes person is hunting, gathering, moving. If they do rest there in a squat position, how is that possible? Because the metabolism has to adapt. If our bodies just let us burn 10,000 calories a day because we're hunting and gathering, guess what? You disappear. We wouldn't exist. You're not going to find 10,000 calories in nature until you understand agriculture and you can raise cattle and all that stuff. It just go out in nature. Go try to find that many calories. You're not going to the body smart. It has to find a way to be energy efficient. That's right. And the kind of activity that the hot set tribes people engage in is the, are the kinds of activity that don't require lots of calorie burning machinery. So their bodies pair muscle down, learn how to reserve calories. They're not big, bulky, strong looking people. They're just lean, athletic, maybe looking not very big and their bodies learn how to burn less calories. Here's the second study. There was a study that compared strength training to cardio, to strength training plus cardio for fat loss. And there were a lot of controls on there, diet and the whole deal. Now, of, of strength training versus cardio, cardio burns way more calories. You do an hour on elliptical or you go around for an hour, you're going to burn three times at least as many calories as if you lift weights for that time. Okay. So you would think, well, cardio was probably going to cause the most fat loss or cardio and strength training would definitely cause more fat loss than just strength training. And that's true. The study came back and showed that strength training by itself, the lowest calorie burning form of exercise in the study, burn the most body fat. It was better than either one of those individually or those put together. Put together. Now you might wonder why. Well, because of how the body adapts and strength training tells the body, we need muscle, muscle burns a lot of calories. It speeds up your metabolism. And because I'm lifting weights, I'm not burning tons of calories while I do it, my body is not getting this crazy signal that says conserve calories. So it allows me to burn body fat, which body fat is a stored source of energy in case of, you know, stress and famine or whatever. And it allows me to speed up my metabolism. So the study showed that they got leaner. So it's important to understand that metabolism is adaptive. So if all you do is eat less calories, what your body will do, and this is how you get fatter, you lose weight on the scale. But the reason why you lost weight on the scale is your body paired muscle down. Now you're just a smaller, flabbier or fatter version of yourself. By the way, if you look up online and hopefully we can find this online. If you put a picture of two individuals that weigh exactly the same, same height next to each other, one of them low body fat, one of them high body fat percentage, same weight. They look really different. So I want people to understand this because the scale just tells you weight. It doesn't tell you what you look like, doesn't tell you a linear. There's another factor that's happening or what's going on here too that you have to take into consideration too is that, OK, this person who's been cutting calories, cutting calories. Let's use the client I'm using example to a point where 1100 calories and she doesn't lose any weight anymore. And the only way I could get her to lose any more weight immediately at that moment is to cut down to say 7 or 800 calories, which is unhealthy or make her do an absurd amount of movement to create a caloric deficit in order to do that. The part that really sucks for that person is that if she goes out and decides one time that week to eat out or one time to have a glass of wine, the ratio of the amount of calories her body is used to eating every day to what that one meal or that one treat is is so much higher. So the person whose body is used to or is adapted to 1000 calories a day. That's what they're burning at 1000 calories a anything over that is considered a surplus for them. And then they go have a glass and a half of wine. That's four or 500 calories. That's 50 percent of their total intake. So it only takes them going off the wagon a little bit. Or we're having what? Yeah. Or one bad day to set all that great work they did for two, which is what so many clients consider it breaks my heart when I think back to the story because I never helped this girl. I had her for a year and I never solved this problem because I didn't understand. I all I kept trying to solve it through more activity or cutting more things out of her diet. And I never truly helped this. Now, ask me what I would do if we go back all over again with my knowledge and experience. Now, that client, which is, by the way, so crazy and so hard for people to wrap their brain around is what I would tell that girl today is we need to eat more. We're not going to actually do any cardio. And actually, and we're going to build, we're going to lift weights and we're going to lift heavy. We're going to speed up your metabolism. We're going to get strong. We're going to build muscle. I'm not worried about you burning a bunch of calories. I don't want you doing any sort of cardio. And I actually want you to eat more food or to hit your and it's so counter to what I think the the messaging has been for so many decades that you wouldn't even think that's the way to go. But yet that is what would have would have solved the problem. Look, if we really think about it, it makes sense. Like anybody watching or listening right now, you know, you have that friend that seems to eat whatever they want and just can't seem to gain a pound. Then you have that other friend that thinks about food and gains body fat. That's how drastically different a metabolism can be. And your metabolism is very adaptive. It's extremely adaptive. If it wasn't, you would die. It's very adaptive. And what makes it adapt up or down are the signals that are being sent to it. And just cutting calories, especially in combination. I'll get to this in a second, especially in combination with high calorie burning forms of exercise that don't tell the body to build muscle. If you do those two together, what you're telling your body to do is we need to learn how to burn less calories quickly. Let's adapt. Conserve as much as possible because the demand is so crazy. Like we're in basically, you know, a state where food is scarce because that's what we're signaling to the body. And two, we have to maintain this high level of activity on top of that. And so, you know, the body's just doing what it's supposed to do and that's to keep you alive and just. So imagine the vicious cycle that most people get into when they head this way. It's they start off, OK, I'm doing this cardio and it's moderate. It's, you know, someone intense, but it's not crazy. You know, they're pushing, they're getting after they're trying to burn thirty minutes elliptical. Yeah. And they cut their calories and then their body doesn't move. And so what they think to do is what? More, more or harder of that. And so they only send a louder signal to what you're saying. So their body was already going, oh, shit, we're doing all this cardio. We're not eating hard. I mean, I need to become efficient. I need to slow down. I need to slow the metabolism down. I need to conserve this energy because she's not feeding very much and she's starting to push the body more than we're used to. And then you as a client get on the scale, you don't see results. And so what do you go? Oh, shit, cut less, push harder. And so you only send a louder signal. And so down here you are week after week, putting in more effort, more consistency, pushing harder than you ever have. And the results are slowing to an absolute stall or nothing at all, or sometimes even worse, starting to reverse. And then it feels impossible. So here's what it looks like. I'll be more specific. And I guarantee people watching this have experiences, they'll do exactly what you said, Adam, they're like, okay, I'm going to eat less, maybe, I don't know, no carbs or I'm going to skip breakfast or I'm going to eat these, you know, salads and that sort of something like that, right? Cut their calories, get on the treadmill. Here's what that looks like. Initial weight loss on the scale. So like 10 pounds gone. Now I'm going to be very clear and the data shows this 100% of that 10 pounds close to half is muscle. So you lost maybe six pounds or five pounds of body fat and maybe four to five pounds of muscle. So now what happens is your metabolism now is matching the amount of calories that you're eating and your body fat percentage barely budged because half was muscle, half was body fat. So you're essentially the same body fat percentage with a slower metabolism, same flabbiness. But now I'm stuck plateau. Oh my God, I lost 10 pounds for the first four weeks. I'm not losing any more weight. What do I do now? Okay, go up because I'm going to get fat. I'm going to eat less or I'm going to do more cardio or both. Then you get another bump down five more more pounds because it starts to slow down five more pounds. But uh oh, more of the weight now is muscle because the body is getting even louder signal. So now you lost five pounds and now maybe three of them are muscle two of them are body fat. Guess what's happening? Body fat percentage is going up. Metabism is slowing down even more. What do I do next? And maybe you've been trapped in the cycle where you do this over and over again. And then you're in this position where you're like, man, I'm doing so much cardio. I'm barely eating anything. I still have 15 pounds to lose on the scale. What do I do? And then you end up with this thought. This isn't for me. That's it. I have terrible genetics. Yeah. I'm meant to be fat. It runs in my it runs in my family. This isn't happening. Maybe I should starve myself. Oh my God, I'm a failure. I can't do this. And then here's what happens. You stop, but you got a slower metabolism. The way you gain back is body fat. And now you can't go. You can't even go back to what you were doing before. Right. Right. Instead of the following, sending the right signals, which we'll get into, but they include eating a little bit more to fuel what you're about to do, send a signal to build muscle. Initially, the scale probably won't move. However, you got leaner. How's that possible? Well, you probably are lost two pounds of body fat and gain two pounds of muscle. So the scale will reflect zero, but you're actually leaner. By the way, if everybody watching this right now lost 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, you would weigh the same on the scale. You'd be much leaner and you would look smaller because here's the other awesome thing about muscle. It's dense. It takes up about three fourths, maybe a little more three fourths of the space that body fat does. So if you trade pound for pound, you keep getting smaller and smaller. So that's why the picture that I talked about earlier of an equal body weight person, one lean, one higher body fat, they don't look like a 200 pound man at six foot tall, who's 10% body fat looks very different than a 200 pound man at 20% body fat, who's six foot tall. They look drastically, drastically different. So what you have to, what you have to think about, if you want to do this in a way that successful is how can I teach my body to get leaner and to burn more calories on its own? Because it's sustainable. That means later on, because here's what that looks like. The weight loss on the scale doesn't start really quick at first, but I am getting leaner. And then the metabolism kicks in and then you get this snowball effect where, which we've experienced this many times, you're eating a little more at the end of your weight loss journey than you were in the beginning. That seems like a much better place for most people. Yeah. And to highlight to the general population that's probably listening to this, how difficult this can be and how frustrating is the story that you were alluding to with my trainers. I mean, that was, to me, that was the moment when I realized like, wow, what a fine line this is, because here I have all these professionals that went to school for this or hadn't been doing this for years, yet they still make this mistake that our clients are struggling with. And that was when it was really obvious to me like, oh, we're, we're really going about this. This was a body fat percent body fat percentage loss competition. Yeah. So what I would do with my trainers, this became an annual competition. This was actually the first time that we had done it though. So this is like a year, maybe eight into my career or whatever. One of the things I used to do to make it fun and competitive, obviously, I'm the boss of like 18 trainers part of my desired outcome, build team camaraderie also have a fit looking staff that's only going to be better for us business wise. And so it was like this kind of and then also have some fun, right? We could win some money. Every trainer would put in, I can't remember I think we did a couple hundred bucks. Each person put in a couple hundred bucks into the pot and then the person with the greatest body fat percentage change would win, right? So whatever wherever you're at, the ratio of where you're at to where you went would be the winner. And and we had actually had, we'd have a non bias, you know, third party and the domain. We had the hydrostatic way, which is you submerge underwater. The most accurate body. Yeah, it's the most accurate. We have one person doing it, the same company that came in on Friday morning. We did everybody. And then I think I did three months from that. I think it was was the timeframe. They came back. Same thing. Friday morning, everybody did it again. And so it was going to be this really concerned that the room for air. So the audience knows and something like that is like, I mean, you could you could try and screw that test up and you still would only be about a half a percent at most. It's not like those, you know, handles you put your hands onto the scales you put your feet on like underwater weighing is extremely nothing more extremely accurate, which that was what made this so interesting because we all know this. We all know, like we're aware that that's why we wanted to use that. We're like, we're going to use the best. We're going to use the best way to track this and all the trainers do it and three months come by and I see all my trainers, you know, everyone's carrying their Tupperware now and everyone's staying after work and I see people on the Stairmaster and it's I mean, it's on everyone's getting into it. Everyone's super competitive about it. And at the end of it, at least half of my trainers were just pissed and they were so pissed and they were so certain that this thing was inaccurate. Yeah, it was broken. Something wasn't right because they knew how much work they had put in. They knew how consistent they were with dieting and cutting calories. They knew how hard they were working cardio wise and they know they didn't eat out or do anything bad. They knew they dropped weight on the scale. They looked smaller and then they got on there and many of them, their body fat percentage stayed the same or even some of them saw an increase from three months later. Even though they lost weight. Even though they lost weight and they just baffled them off and it did not understand. But that just shows you what a fine line it is of cutting calories and increasing activity like that and how quickly the body will adapt in the opposite direction that you want it to go to. And it was at that moment when I really realized like, whoa, we're probably going if my trainers are doing this to themselves, how many of our clients are we going about this the wrong way when it comes to diet and exercise? 100 percent. So, you know, rule number one or step number one with sending the right signal to the body for your metabolism to either not slow down or speed up and for you to get leaner is to strength rain. That's the only form of exercise where the direct adaptation, the direct signal is to build muscle. Now, other forms of exercise may send an indirect signal because maybe you a little more need a little more strength because you never run. So now you're running a little bit or maybe because you never do whatever yoga. But the signal is weak at best and in many cases, in some cases, you actually lose muscle because the body learns how to become more efficient, like long duration cardio is like this long duration cardio. You don't need strength to run for long distance. You just need stamina. In fact, too much muscle becomes detrimental. This is why long distance runners have no don't have a lot of muscle either. They're just very small. Right. So you got to lift weights to at least send a signal that says build muscle. Now, the first step with diet is to eat a high protein diet. This is such a big deal that they now we even have studies now that show this, which is blows people when these when these studies were coming out, blue people's minds, they'll have studies will have the same calories. So the the energy intake is the same. But the difference between the two is that this group over here eats adequate protein. So like whatever the RDA recommends. And this group over here eats what is considered a very high protein diet, which usually breaks down to about a gram of protein per pound of target body weight. So if you're listening right now and let's say you want to weigh 110 pounds, that means you're aiming for a day every day 110 grams of protein, OK? RDA would tell you something like 30 or 40 grams of protein. But this 110 is considered high if that's your that's your body weight goal. When they do these studies, same energy intake, high protein is leaner with more muscle. So just because the protein is high, they have more muscle and it's there seems to be and it's probably an indirect effect from the muscle gain, a fat loss effect. So if you want to eat more to be leaner, combine it with strength training, you got to hit those protein targets. By the way, this is a lot harder than people think. Even if you're small and your goal is eat 100 grams of protein a day, that would mean you 33 grams of protein three times a day. That's not like a typical two way breakfast. It's a sink. It's the single first place I would go with all of my female clients that were trying to pursue weight loss. Yes. Strength, train, increase protein intake 100 percent across the board, not most, not some. Everybody, everybody under was under consuming protein and or they were not even hitting they weren't hitting optimal. So even if they were OK, RDA wise, like health wise, but not for building muscles. That's what you have to understand is that another reason why that's so important, not just because for health purposes and what it does for the types of foods that you choose and it's muscle sparing, but it's it's how you're going to build muscle. If you go in and you send a signal by lifting weights to build muscle, but then you don't give the body, the building blocks to build that muscle. You're only going to get so much muscle out of it. Now, if you're consistent and you give the body what it needs nutritionally, i.e. protein while you're sitting that signal, then you're going to build the most amount of muscle. And if you build the most amount of muscle, your metabolism is going to go up because those those pounds of muscle require more calories to survive than fat does on your body. Therefore, it speeds your metabolism up. Plus the benefit psychologically too, because you're eating and seeking out protein, which is challenging to eat adequate amount of protein per day that's required. But what you're doing is you're focused on increasing calories when, in fact, it's so satiating that a lot of times it just naturally sort of lowers the amount of calories you're consuming anyways. And so what you're focused on before was a negative in terms of like I had to reduce and cut out all this stuff out of my diet. And you're almost like in that punishing sort of mentality versus I need to grab something that's going to help me build and fuel myself. That point you're making is so true that when I had these clients that were trying to lose 20, 30, 500 pounds and trying to lose weight. And we're my female clients. And we started to do this. I wouldn't even care about calories. All I would say is go hit the protein intake, because I knew how hard it was to hit the protein intake consistently. And if they were doing that through whole foods, people who've never done it have no idea. It would have such a hard time. They're not going to overeat. They're just not going to if they every day they hit that, especially if they eat it through whole foods. It's going to be really tough. It's going to be tough for them just to get to the amount of calories that I want to get. Much less over. Building muscle requires nutrients like protein, especially, and it also requires fuel. So for a lot of people, if you really want to go down this metabolism boosting highway, if you really want to see metabolism boost, you eat the protein and you still try to eat a little more because you have to fuel that metabolism boost and you have to send the signal to the body that says it's safe to burn more calories. Remember, like the Hodza tribe study showed your body, if it feels like calories are scarce, it will adapt and slow its metabolism down. It will change its caloric requirements. Feeding yourself and feeding yourself appropriately tells your body, Hey, it's OK to burn more calories. By the way, on the flip side, eating two little calories tells the body the opposite. It tells the body. In fact, in fact, although the effect isn't massive in a 24 hour period, you can measure this right now. If a person ate less or more, their metabolism would adapt that day. You would see it the following day. If you all of a sudden dropped your calories below, you would see a little bit of an adaptation, not a huge one, but it's because it's only a day, but you'd see a little bit of adaptation in caloric burn. So eating more calories, reverse dieting is part of this, right? Reverse diet is where you slowly bump calories as you strength train. And the goal is to boost the metabolism to a point where it gets so high, then you can cut calories and end up in a really safe, maintainable place. The other thing, too, is that when you eat too little and you just try to burn calories for activity and don't tell your body to build muscle, there's something very interesting that happens. So your body's part of the way your body signals muscle growth, fat storage, tissue remodeling is through the hormone system. Hormones are chemical signals in the body. OK, when you cut your calories too low and you do lots of calorie burning exercise that doesn't say build muscle, your body will organize its hormones in a way to reduce muscle mass and to promote fat storage. Remember your body, think about it this way, think about your bank account. If all of a sudden you lose your job or the economy slows down, you're trying to save money. You're not trying to spend more money. You're like, look, we're not getting any money. I just lost my job. I'm going to try and conserve as much as possible. I'm going to take the bus or I'm going to walk. I'm not going to eat out, etc. Now imagine if all of a sudden you made tons of money, you win the lottery, economy is crushing. Well, now you're like, yeah, I'll buy those expensive shoes. I'll get that purse. I'll go spend on that streaming service because I got plenty of money that's coming in. Well, your body will do this as well, and it does that through its hormones. So you have what are called catabolic hormones. And you have what are called anabolic hormones. Anabolic hormones are the ones that tell your body to build calorie burning tissue, mainly muscle. OK, catabolic hormones tell your body to burn calories, but also tell your body to learn how to slow down with some metabolism. Cortisol is a very popular one. Too much cortisol all the time. By the way, you need cortisol. But if it's always high all the time, your body will eat away at its muscle and will start to learn how to store more body fat. In fact, it'll actually change over time how your body stores body fat. Too much cortisol over time. There's some evidence that shows that it may actually promote belly fat storage or visceral body fat, which is actually harder to burn. So what happens to you is if you overwork out and under eat, your hormones become more catabolic and less anabolic. Here is a sign. This is a very for men. There's a there's a sign for men and women. There's a sign that's specific to women. But for men and women, one of the signs is reduced libido. That means anabolic hormones are dropping, sleep disturbances, excessive fatigue, hot and cold intolerance. If all of a sudden, like you're always cold or the heat is just too barren, like you just have this really bad intolerance to temperatures. That's a sign. Women. Here's a very clear sign. You lose your period. If a woman and you see female athletes do this all the time because they'll overtrain themselves and under eat. If a woman loses her period and she stops menstruating, it means her body literally believes it is not safe to conceive. There's not enough calories. There's too much stress. We're going to make you infertile. When I used to train female clients, those that had a regular menstrual cycle, if they came to me and I'm looking at their diet and exercise and they also didn't have a period and they're like, I haven't had it for a year or whatever. Oh, yeah. We're strength training. We're cutting your activity and we're going to make you eat more calories and reverse. We're going to reverse diet and like clockwork almost every single time, unless there was a bigger issue, you would see their their their period. What's so important about that, too, Sal, is that if if that's out of balance and then you're also trying to ask your body to burn fat or build muscle, it's going to prioritize health first when it when the hormones are out of whack like that and you're still pushing the body, you're putting on all this work, hoping you're going to get this return of, you know, I'm lifting weights and I'm running like crazy. So I'm hoping I'm going to build some muscle. I'm hoping I'm going to burn some body fat, but your hormones are so out of whack that it wants to just to be healthy and balanced. It's not going to listen to what you're trying to tell it with building muscle. No, it's dangerous to build muscle at that point. Yeah, if it's not healthy to have a baby, it's not going to listen to you about burning body fat and building muscle. And so getting that balance and getting that healthy first is far more a priority than what we're doing as far as the cardiovascular work or even in the strength training field. You've got to figure that out first. Yes. So the strategy for many people when it comes to real fat loss, the kind that shows up in the mirror, the kind that makes you feel good, the kind that's sustainable is eat a high protein diet, don't drop your calories too low, build muscle. If you do those things right there, then you're on the right track. If your strategy is I'm just going to eat a lot less, I'm just going to move as much as possible, then you're probably going to lose muscle and put yourself in an unsustainable position. I think it's important to talk a little bit about the psychology of this and the way we would have to communicate a client through this process because you've got to understand that you take a client who is used to hearing all the things that we were talking about the beginning. And then this is like a complete paradigm shift of like, wait a second, like you're going to tell me to eat more, stop the cardio, lift weights, it's a major hard pill, it's a very hard pill as well. So when I when I get clients that are like this, the things that I'm communicating to them when it comes to like their ultimate goal, which is let's say lose 50 pounds or whatever number it is, is I'm not concerned about that right now. In fact, I want the scale to stay the same, maybe even go up a little bit, which wrap your brain around that. This is tough. Someone comes in, I want to lose 50 pounds at him, I'm paying you to help me. And I'm telling you, OK, in the first 30 to 60 days, we might actually see the scale go up one or two pounds. I don't want you to fret. We're actually doing great. You need to mentally be ready for that. So as you're hearing this advice from us, you also need to be mentally prepared for the possibility of training for 30, even sometimes 60 days of increasing calories, hitting your protein take strength training and the scales staying the same or going on. Here's why I tell people to throw the scale away, especially if that if you're sensitive to that, don't look. You know, it's funny about that, by the way. I used to get the when I figured out how to do this, this is what would happen to my clients all the time. We'd have this conversation and I'd tell them, don't weigh yourself and because it's going to mess with you and explain how this whole conversation with them. So they would do that. They take their scale, put in the closet. I was very popular, put it under the bed, not weigh themselves. Then 60 days, 30, 60 days, they'd come and see me and be like, you know, three people today asked me how much weight I lost. I really want to weigh myself and I'd say, don't do it. Don't do it. And they say, no, no, everybody, my husband says I lost weight. I had two co-workers come up to me say that my weight, my waist looks smaller. Everything looks cleaner. People think I lost 12 pounds. I'd say, OK, are you ready to weigh yourself? Because the scale might show might might throw you off. And they're like, yeah, let's do it. We get on the scale. One pound lost. No pounds lost. And they say, how's that possible? Why does everybody think I'm leaner? Because you are leaner. You just built muscle while burning body fat. You're smaller. The scale lies to you. It's a it's a it's an evil way in tissue. Yes. So what should you monitor then? If this is you, here's what you look at strength. Am I stronger in the gym? Can I lift more weight? Can I do more reps? By the way, if you want to do this right, don't do circuit training, don't do 15 exercises strung together because you're just doing cardio. You have to lift weights like someone who's trying to build muscle straight sets, rest for two or three minutes, straight sets, two or three minutes, reps between five to 12. Do those compound lifts. Try to get strong. If you're getting stronger, you're going in the right direction. Now, if you want to measure anything else, then use body fat percentage testing. Do it every two weeks and look at the trends. Don't freak out over the number one number to the next, but over the course of four, six, eight weeks, look at the trends and that'll tell you, oh, I'm getting stronger and my body fat percentage is going down. I'm moving in the right direction. I would also add that to this client. I'm communicating to them that I know the goal is or the ultimate goal is to lose 50 pounds, but our immediate goal is to build our metabolism first. And where I want you to be before we decide to get to the 50 pounds of fat loss, right? Where I want you to be is I want you to be at a place calorically that when I cut calories from you, it's sustainable long term. So that means if you eat 2,200 to 2,400 calories and you feel good eating that many calories, that feels like it's sustainable. You enjoy that. That's plenty of food for you. That means I need to get somewhere like 28 to 2,900 calories so that when I cut you down to 24, that that's a place that you like to be. And so you need to take that into consideration that wherever your cork intake currently is at, that if you want to start cutting that and aggressively lose body fat, you got to know that that cut is somewhere you can sustain. And that's the mistake a lot of these clients make is they're like, OK, I'm going to go do this fat loss journey. And they cut their calories and they all say the same thing like, I just want to lose the 50 pounds. Then when I get there, I'll figure it out. Well, it doesn't work that way. It's like you're going to keep cutting these calories. You may even get close or on, you know, halfway towards your goal. And then you're going to realize you're in a place where it's like, I can't live off a 900 calories. You know, who's a great example of this, by the way? We just had her on the show. Marie Llewellyn. Am I saying her name right? OK, so she, young lady, she was lucky in the sense that she did this the right way right out of the gates. As a young lady, 99% of the time when they're trying to get leaner, they do the wrong thing. They just do tons of cardio and cut their calories. But her husband, boyfriend at the time, was like a bodybuilder guy. So she just did what he told her. Yeah. And she did it the right way. So she didn't run into any of those obstacles. In fact, we we we interviewed her. I remember when we were talking with her, that was the thing that I pointed out. I was like, it's so crazy to me when she was telling her story. I'm like, you did the right way. I'm like, yeah, do you realize like how many of the right choices you made and how rare that is in a in a in a major weight loss journey like you had. And she did. She attributed a lot of that to. She's like, I eat a lot. I feel good. I live for it. It's like, man, most people, especially your age, they do it the wrong way and they end up coming to us broken. And it takes us a while to fix that. So think about that, too. Like in a more simple way to say that is if you if you are female who's trying to lose 10, 20, 30 plus pounds, you want to train like a bodybuilder who's trying to build muscle. 100%. That is what's going to get you your goal the fastest and the most sustainable once you get there. Perfect. Look, if you like our show, go to mindpumpfree.com and check out all of our free fitness guides. You can also find all of us on Instagram. Justin is at Mind Pump. Justin, I'm at Mind Pump to Stefano and Adam is at Mind Pump, Adam.