 Look, check this out. Sometimes you can actually lose weight on the scale and still get fatter. Ooh, I like skinny fat Do I now? I remember the first time this happened to a client of mine, and they were so Befuddled a great word right before yeah, they were so flabbergasted That that they were like they were depressed about it and so what happened so I'll tell the story remember when this first happened to you Yeah, I'm gonna that I was devastated So so what happens is and I'll tell the story of my client So she did an extreme diet no did an extreme diet and lost 10 pounds on the scale I tested her body fat percentage and her body fat percentage went up a percent and She was like how is this possible the scale is went down? It doesn't make any sense And I said look I said body fat percentage is a percentage of your overall body weight So if you lost 10 pounds But seven pounds was muscle and three pounds was body fat you are smaller But now your body fat is a larger percentage of your overall body weight because you've lost muscle So and this happens to people sometimes they'll lose weight and they've lost muscle through either doing just tons of cardio And cutting their calories too low and whatever and then they are smaller But flabbier versions of the cells with the slower metabolism can't figure out what happens It was always a hard conversation when you get the body fat dunk tank to come in and do these competitions and Yeah, and that would be the information that they would receive was like wow But now my my my entire composition of body fat increased like how is that even possible? This didn't just this didn't just happen sometimes this happens most of the time Yeah, and I'll never forget when I brought the dunk tank in for all my trainers So we did a competition. So this is when it really came full circle Oh Bro, so I kind of seen it with clients and when you when it's a client Part of that is you're wondering if well, maybe they the adherence right? Maybe they weren't listening to what you said or maybe they weren't training that hard or maybe whatever right? You're kind of as a trainer you're going like oh, I wonder how honest they're being with me about what they said They were doing well, I did this competition at this time. I have like 20 some trainers I believe Justin's part of this group and There's like 20 something trainers. We decided to do I put money on the line You know who can get you know the change the greatest change in body fat percentage Over a course of like three months and so everyone's all in on this and when we go and get dunked I'd say more than half of my trainers including myself on the first one My body fat percentage went up and I mean this is after me like Consistently dieting training consistently not fucking up anywhere and I was pissed And I remember everybody thought the dunk tank was inaccurate But what it really highlighted is how easily you can over train and under eat Even people that are that's that advanced understand nutrition and exercise really well How what a fine line that is when you are in a caloric deficit? And and you're also training like five seven days a week like most these trainers were how easily you can drop 1015 pounds on the scale and all it takes right you lose 10 pounds on the scale all it takes for the body fat percentage to Go up in a situation like that. It's not as difficult as you think 10 pounds come off the scale and six of it is muscle And four of its fat and you got fatter even though you're 10 pounds lighter on the scale This was mind-blowing for all my trainers and a lot of them were debating. Oh, it's not true. I look better I feel better. It's like nah, bro. You lost muscle because speed is not in your benefit with with losing weight Well, what happens is that what happens is and this happens to clients it happens to trainers is They decide they're gonna get shredded or lean out how they overdo it and they read Yeah, they cut back dramatically on calories They increase activity and then they just watch the scale and they watch Irradiation stay to that point your body is trying to reserve as much energy and it's it's deceiving because this not only does a skill Don't but you get smaller. Yeah, you're your pant Well, you're yeah, you look different. So you start going like oh, it's working I'm going the right the right direction not realizing that you're you're losing muscle Okay, as fast as you are losing body fat. Yep to put it differently just so if someone's confused watching this right now So 20 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound Person is 20% body fat, which is for a man that would be high body fat percentage Okay, so if you had a hundred pound guy 20 pounds of body fat. He's at 20% body fat That's a lot of body fat for someone that wait now if you took a 200 pound man Who had the same amount of body fat 20 pounds of body fat? It's 10% body fat That is lean. That's a six pack on the 200 pound man So that's kind of how it works on the flip side You can gain weight on the scale and get leaner and get a leaner body fat percentage So if everybody watching this right now lost zero pounds of body fat, but gain 10 pounds of muscle Your body fat percentage would automatically drop because now that amount of body fat you have on your body is a smaller percentage Of your all body weight overall body weight and this is why oftentimes I'd get clients Whose weight would go up a little bit on the scale and they couldn't understand why they would keep getting Compliments that they were looking leaner look better. Yeah, like this is so weird My co-workers keep telling them I look leaner, but I gained like three or four pounds on the scale How is this possible? I love this conversation because this was a very pivotal moment for me as a trainer because it completely changed the way I Communicated this to my client my weight loss clients my clients that want to lose 50 40 50 plus pounds of fat and This is this is the beginning of when I would start having this conversation of okay I know you hired me to lose 50 pounds But what I'm gonna tell you right now is this first month or two I actually don't want to see anything come off the scale. We're just a couple years before that You know, I was on I was in a hurry to show them weight loss So they would resign with me. It's like oh you want to lose 50 pounds So they let's say they bought 10 sessions. I got a month with them. Okay, I gotta show them I gotta show them some results and so cut the galleries Cardio train them and then at the end of the month I'm like we did 10 pounds All right Let's sign up for some more and then before you know it you hit this hard plateau or you go do the body fat percentage and realize Oh shit, they got fatter So this was a complete shift in the way I looked and trained my clients going forward and I started telling those clients that wanted to lose weight that listen I know that's your ultimate goal But it's body fat that we really want to lose that's it because you could cut your leg off and lose 20 pounds That's not the kind of weight that you want to lose. It's about body fat percentage and the difference between a lean You know if you're a female watching this if you're a woman and you're like I want to get down to I don't know I'll make up a number. I want to get down to 110 pounds Forget that for a second. What you probably want is a lean body fat percentage, right? And the weight on the scale is a bit arbitrary. It doesn't mean much I've talked about this many times on the podcast, but I used to have this female trainer that worked for me And she was just she was lean and sculpted and she lifted weights all the time very athletic And I would bring her in my office oftentimes to to help sell Memberships and personal training now. She wouldn't come in and sell the programs It was usually when I had a and this typically would happen with women because they were a little bit more reluctant to Wanted see the scale go up at all and typically it's because I'm showing them the weights And I'm showing the machines and we're doing a tour of the gym and they'll say something like no No, I don't want to bulk up. I'm not trying to build. I just want to do with the treadmill I just want to and I'd explain kind of what we're talking about now and then I do this challenge for them It was a very effective thing. It was an incredible sales tool and I'd sit down with them And I'd say I tell you what I'm gonna bring in one of my female trainers And if you can guess her body weight within 15 pounds, I'll give you a free membership for a month But if you can't guess then you need to really strongly consider what I'm talking about How did that sound? I'd be like, oh, yeah, I'll guess I'd bring her in and she was a five foot one Lean tiny waist sculpted, you know female trainer and they would always guess like a hundred pounds a hundred and five pounds She was a hundred and thirty pounds But she was small because muscles very dense muscle takes up about two-thirds The amount of space that body fat does but this is a good conversation because it's a really good conversation Because this is I think this is one of the number one reasons why people struggle with fat loss because it's not as simple as we make I know there's a lot of stuff right now Where we you you hear the law of thermodynamics, right the calories in calories out That's all it is like oh if I'm you're eating this much cut up down to this But it's not that simple because if you take somebody let's say they're maintenance, right? So they they don't lose or gain two thousand calories They want to lose X amount of pounds of fat so they decide to reduce their calories. They drop down to 1500 calories Okay, seems fine, but what happens if the of those 1500 calories? They're only getting 20 grams of protein for the day. What is going to happen? Yeah, yeah lose muscle or what if they're not sending a hey I need muscle signal, right? And then there's doing more cardio based exercise, right? They got circuit training going on so you got circuit training going on so they're lifting really light weights I'm not really sending a loud muscle building signal. They're burning tons of calories. They're eating 20 to 30 grams of protein What is going to happen? Yeah, your body is gonna pare down muscle You're not feeding it enough to keep that muscle on this thinking not a single loud enough to keep muscle And so what ends up happening is yeah, the scale goes down, but they just slow their metabolism down your body keep this in mind This is an evolutionary trait, right? So we evolved for thousands and thousands and thousands of years in an environment where calories were Very tough to come by very starvation was one of the number one threats It's no longer that way, but this is how we typically evolved and so what your body is very good at doing two things It will number one adjust your behaviors To get you back at calorie maintenance in other words if you're eating lower than you're burning it'll ramp up Appetite it'll lower energy to try and get you to sit and not move as much It'll do all kinds of things to your behaviors to get you to burn less calories or especially eat more calories, right? So that's one the other thing that it does is it tries to change the calorie burn Side of the formula by reducing your caloric requirements One of the most effective ways to do this besides getting you to not move as much One of the most effective ways to do this is to shrink the size of your engine So it's like it's like if you have a car if I want to make my V8, you know suburban Burn less gas and I had the ability to snap my fingers and give myself a four cylinder engine That would be one of the most effective ways to do it was cut the engine in fact, you know newer models In fact, they'll do that they'll switch from four cylinder to eight cylinder depending on how you drive to reduce The amount of gas consumption so what your body does is it's always constantly Working its hormones and manipulating its own tissues and your behaviors to keep that balance So that's the challenge. That's why weight loss is so hard and that's why it's so hard to maintain So what we can do the most effective thing we can do in this scenario is understand this and say What are some things that I can do that will convince my body? So it's what you got to do you got to convince your body to increase my calorie burn, right? Now I can force it by just moving more all the time But your body is very very good at making movement more efficient It can actually learn and teach itself to burn less and less calories over time doing the same type of activity And it's very good at doing this the most effective way to manipulate the calorie burn is to build The size of your engine right gain muscle So you have to if you really want to lose weight in an effective way you have to tell your body We need more muscle. We need strength It's more important to us that we're strong and then we have muscle for our survival Then it is to have a lower calorie burning engine That's the argument that you're basically making to your body. So how do you do that? Well, you lift weights now your body the stress that your body is is sensing is well, we need strength But that's not all you also have to feed it appropriately because if you don't feed it appropriately You can send all the strength muscle building signal you want your body's like we just don't have the capacity We try to bring this up because I mean this strategy was that provide you with like an increased appetite You have more options of flexibility in your diet like having more strength for longevity You avoid arthritis and pains and unnecessary, you know abilities that are you're just gonna lose those abilities When you don't have strength and you're not gonna be able to do as much and so it and plus you get you're gonna get better sleep You're gonna have more energy. There's just a lot more benefits with that strategy than to just pare down You know your overall mass and and slim down Yeah And then the other thing to consider too is when you are in that when you understand this and you're like The scale is one metric But it's part of a big pie that I need to take a look at and in a most more important piece of the pie Is body fat percentage because that means much more than just the scale as we just explained Performance and strength and all those things. Let's look at the whole picture. Let's consider that Let's let's adjust our training nutrition around that and then when we do and we're sending the right signal to build muscle And we're feeding the body appropriately What the body does so let's say the body says, okay, I'm getting the message. We need strength We need muscle. Oh, and we have the nutrients to do so so we feel safe doing so it doesn't stop there Here's one of my favorite things that happens your body Organizes its messenger hormones or just its hormones to do this right so what kind what hormone profile? Tells your body to build more muscle well in men and in women a muscle building hormone profile is a youth Hormone profile. It's a similar one to the one you have when you're feeling great and you're in your teens and 20s It's higher testosterone both in men and women balanced estrogen and progesterone of women better growth hormone better insulin Sensitivity so it's like this incredible cascading effect now if you don't do any of that And you ignore that and you just look at the scale and all you care about is losing weight on the scale You very often will fall into the trap of telling my body to lose muscle pair it down Now my hormones are organized in a way to reduce muscle mass This is why over dieting over cardio and men results in lower testosterone levels in women You see the effects of HPA axis dysfunction which we used to call adrenal fatigue back in the day I know people rolled their eyes But that's what we used to kind of refer to it as higher cortisol Estrogen and progesterone imbalanced and then as you said Adam you hit this nasty plateau So you're like oh, I'm eating 1500 calories. I lost 10 pounds. Oh, no, it's not working anymore I guess I go down to 1200 calories lost four at five more pounds now what go down to a thousand calories Okay, and then you get to your goal and you're like I got a thousand calories for the rest of my life Yeah, right like how is this gonna possibly And that's why you know 85 plus percent put it all back on yes It was at one point and do you blame them at one point you go my goal was to lose 50 pounds I busted my ass to get 30 to 40 off. I'm eating only a thousand calories a day I'm training five to seven days a week. This is fucking miserable. I'd rather be a little fatter Yeah, you just accept that's what happens. It's exactly what happens people But it doesn't have to be that way But it and it really it's that shift like you have to start looking at okay I know this is my my long-term goal is to lose the 50 pounds or whatever it is But I first want to build a metabolism that's going to help me versus working against your metabolism by instantly just cutting Yeah, it's like this. I'll use an analogy, right? It's like you got to paint Up the huge fence you get this huge fence you happy trees and you're gonna just paint it with one coat And you have a paintbrush It's one of those little tiny paint brushes that you could do little details on Canvases with and then you also have a roller or a spray, you know machine that sprays paint, right? And what do you do you pick the frickin paintbrush and you sit there and after a year you get like a third of the way there And you're like I'm done man I can't keep to this taking for all you had to do was pick up the frickin the the the spray machine or pick up the roller and you would have been done in three months because you would have Done something it would have done it in a way that was far more effective So this is and it's so frustrating the reason why I brought this up is because People often do what you said Adam is they though. Oh body fat test. It's not accurate. Oh, it's it's long There's no way this could possibly happen. Oh, no it happens. It's actually more often. Well, yeah Because you're still doing work and so you attribute the work as progress Yes, you know, you know might not be taking you to the desired outcome Hey, if you enjoyed that clip you can find the full episode here Or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe