 Is your metabolism too fast? Want to figure out what to do about it? Watch this. Our next caller is Christian from Nebraska. Christian, what's happening? How can we help you? Hey, Sal, Adam, and Justin, and Doug, great to be on the show. Thank you for taking my question, which is, when will the Maps Shake Weight program finally drop? Adam keeps trying to tell us. He's like, this created a long time ago. His forms are huge because of it. So anyways, I'll try to keep this short. So I'm just going to give you all the information up front and then let it ride from there. So I'm a 28-year-old male, around 160-165 pounds, 5'9", remain between 8% to 11% body fat. I'm a lifelong lifter. I've always loved lifting weights and doing physically strenuous activities. I currently feel in pretty good shape and fairly strong for my size, but I have hit a lifting plateau for the past 6 to 12 months and have been trying to bulk to put on more muscle. I find myself running into a few issues, so here are my questions. First is tips for increasing appetite. I'm tracking and trying to hit 3,000 plus calories a day with 160-180 grams of protein. I'm solid for three to five days in a row, but then my appetite drops off and I essentially do a fast, which basically makes that whole week end up in a maintenance. Question two, is there any case for purposely slowing down your metabolism to enter a bulk? I currently need to eat 3,000 calories to gain muscle, and it would be nice if I could slow down my metabolism and build muscle off of 25 or 2600 calories, but I recognize many people would love to have a metabolism as fast as mine, so maybe that's short-sighted of me. Question three, I noticed my macrosine calories are a lot harder to hit when my protein intake is high. Is there an argument for going lighter on protein during a bulk? Maybe 140 to 150 grams for me and increasing my carbs and fat to help give me a better chance of sustaining calorie surplus since I won't feel so satiated. And then lastly, just some additional context. I work a demanding job in energy technology sales and provide for my family. My oldest is a little bit older than Maximus and my youngest is a little younger than Aurelius, so stress levels and sleep could probably be a little bit better, so I'm sure Sal and Adam can testify to. I currently lift in the morning between 5 and 7 a.m. before my girls wake up. I've been training in two to leave the past six months, but recently started maps in a bollock in reverse order. And not a question, but if you have any good YouTube videos or resources with tips for making macro tracking less time-consuming for busy parents and professionals like me, that would also be really cool. And there, that's the end. Was that fast enough? I already forgot. I'll start with the first one. Listen, eating more at 3,000 plus count really hard. I know what that feels like, so it's very difficult. The best piece of advice I could give you aside from, and you're following maps in a bollock because I wasn't going to say, look at your workout programming, but obviously that's good. Drink more calories. So try giving yourself a shake in between meals or one before bed. Easy way to get an extra 500 calories. That would be the best thing I think that might help. The second part about slowing down your metabolism, the short answer is no. You could lose muscle. That would slow your metabolism down, but that's the opposite of what you want. So you're in a bit of a tough situation. I guess you could look forward to the fact that you'll get older and that might slow down your metabolism a little bit, but it's a challenging thing when you're dealing with the faster metabolism. I know there's a lot of people listening right now who want to throw their shoe at their TV screen because they're dealing with the opposite of it. Especially when you go to cuts, that's the benefit there. The grass is greener kind of effect. He did bring up a good potential strategy though as far as reducing his protein intake. It sounds like you're probably one and a half per pound of body weight. That was the third part, right? And yes, there is. Higher protein is more important when you're in a deficit than it is when you're in a surplus. When you're in a deficit, a higher protein diet is obviously it's more satiating, so it helps with that, but it's also muscle sparing. Obviously one of the issues with dieting is that you might lose some muscle. As your carbohydrates, fats and calories go up, you don't need as much protein. In other words, if you, let's say, what was your body weight? 160 to 165. 160 to 165. You could eat probably 100 grams of protein or 120 grams of protein and eat more carbs and fats if those are more palatable and allow you to eat more calories, and you'll be okay. If your calories are low and you're in a cut, that's when you want to make sure the protein is really high, but you don't need to eat a one to one when your calories are that high for the most part. Now, I would bet that you probably start to pack on a little bit of mass if you did what I just said, because it'll help you with the caloric intake part, because protein really does hammer the appetite. I want to add to that strategy, too. This was a big struggle of mine for most, for sure, in my 20s. One of the mistakes that I would make is because I knew that I needed more calories and I was always struggling to get more calories. I'd always lean towards these high calorie meals, and a lot of times I was piling on some garbage in there, and then that would actually end up satiating me for four or five hours at a time. I found that when I ate on the leaner side earlier, that my body would actually digest the food, process it, and then use it quicker, and then I was ready to eat again, whereas if I were to eat something that was really heavy or higher calorie, it would end up satiating me for a longer period of time. Actually, eating leaner foods earlier in the day and then allowing me to pile on the higher fat, higher protein meals towards the back half of the day, if that makes sense, that helped me a lot by doing that. Yeah. Yeah, it's digestion. I'm glad you said that, Adam. If you're eating foods that you're making a little bloated or lethargic, that's going to hurt a lot. The more calories I eat, the more I need to pay attention to digestibility. If I'm trying to bulk, I want to eat foods that are really easy to digest, because otherwise I'm going to screw myself as the day goes on. That's probably a better way to say that what I said, but it's not so much leaner foods. It's food like rice and chicken. My body can tear through that. If I was eating rice and ground turkey or chicken, I felt like I could eat a quick 500 calories, and then I was ready to eat in an hour again. Whereas if I had a real heavy bacon or steak and something type of breakfast with my eggs, then I didn't want to eat till noon or one, where if I ate something on the lighter side, easy for me to digest, I was ready to eat that next meal again. And so that was a major strategy that helped me continue to scale my calories. And then with the shakes, make sure you eat dinner. Try to eat dinner by six o'clock. Let's say you go to bed at 10 at eight o'clock, I would drink a high calorie shake. It's a lot easier to get down, get a shake down than to get food down, especially at the end of the day. And that was something I used to do back in the day, because it was just a lot easier. So I understand your challenge. I know a lot of people again are listening or like screw this guy, but it could be really hard when you're trying to put on size and you're burning through it. Well, the other thing that helped a lot, and it sounds like you're already doing it now, the mistake I was making when I was younger was also training six, seven days a week. My thought process was the more I lift, the harder I train, the more muscle I was going to build. One of the biggest summers I ever had as far as packing on muscle was the year that I decided to back way off the amount of training I was doing and scale it back to three days a week, which was scary for me at first. I thought, oh my God, if I'm going to cut my training in half, I'm going to lose all this muscle. And the opposite was true. In fact, I needed that, probably that break from it because my body was just having a hard time keeping up with all the training and movement. It allowed me to not have to eat as many calories to put on mass and size, plus gave me ample recovery time. So I was actually building instead of constantly breaking down. So that was another pivotal moment. So if you're just now starting anabolic, hopefully you see those benefits too. And I don't know what your training looked like before that. Yeah, I definitely had that worry when I first went to anabolic the first time I did it. I was kind of nervous about cutting my training in half and doing three foundational days, but I actually responded pretty well to it. I think I was overtraining a bit. So the past few years following maps, anabolic, math, performance, map strong, I've really increased my performance overall. So I love the programming that you guys do. And it sounds counterintuitive, especially for people like me that just like to keep going. But that was probably the best thing for me to have those foundational days and then focus on priming and trigger sessions on my off days. So yeah, thank you for that. And then, Sal, you brought up the digestive things. And that's something I was thinking about too. And I was, I just ordered some mass dimes. So I think I'm going to try to give that a shot and see if that helps with my digestion. And maybe I will hit 3,000 calories and won't feel so won't won't lose my appetite after three to five days, if I'm using something like that. So I'm going to give that a try too. Yeah, I liked it with the with the mass times. I'll do like one as I start eating and then one halfway through my meal. Okay. And I'll notice a difference for sure. Cool. All right. Thanks for calling in, man. Yeah. Hey, just real quick, I've been listening to your show for four years because some asshole at the gym I used to go to didn't have headphones and forced everyone in the locker room to listen to your show each morning. Hey, who's that asshole? I like it. Yeah. But but now I'm hooked and grateful for it. So the fitness information is obviously great, but it's also cool to follow along with the parenting stuff since I'm on a similar timeline with Sal and Adam. So your tips and commentary have definitely improved my overall quality of life. And just thank you for everything, guys. Yeah, thank you, man. You're a good man. Thank you, Christian. Yeah. Have a good day. Bye. Yeah, it's funny when people talk about this, you know, there's like 90% of the audience is like rolling their eyes. Oh, it's hard for you to get away. I used to hate that. Do people give you, I mean, listen, the grass is always green on the other side. You know what I'm saying? There's advantages and disadvantages for both sides of this, dude. So it's like, I remember when Pekolsky blew my mind with that. I remember we sat down, he's a pro bodybuilder. It was massive back in the day. And I'm like, man, pro bodybuilders have this incredible digestion to be able to eat 10,000 calories a day to get big. He goes, no, it's the opposite. Pro bodybuilders can eat very little and gain lots of muscle. And then of course I, of course, like I blew my mind. I'm doing that right now. I'm trying to eat over 3,500 calories a day. And it's hard. It sucks. And you know what the biggest issue is? If I get to like noon or one and I'm behind the eight ball, forget about it. It's not going to happen now. Cause now I got a little, what am I going to, you know, stuff. Well, that was another piece of advice we didn't give him that I always give when I'm talking to a hearty heavy morning. It's so important to get ahead, to get ahead of what you need. Because otherwise you're playing catch up and then you're stuffing yourself right before bed, which is not ideal for sleep. And so that was key. Like I always knew that, you know, depending on where my core can take was, I had always set like noontime goals. Like, okay, my goal is to be at this many calories and this much protein by this time. I knew if I would hit that, that the rest of the day would go well. If I was behind it, a lot of times it'd be fucked. By the way, if you wanted to try the mass times I was talking about, you go to mind pump partners.com and then you click on bio optimizers, mass times, and then there's a discount code there for you.