 Question is from Laura Andrews, 1989. Do you have any advice for someone trying to put on muscle but is struggling with eating extra calories? If I eat much more than what I'm currently eating, it makes me feel sick. Yeah, this is a good one. Because most of my life I've tried to put on muscle, I know exactly what this feels like. And it took me a long time to kind of work around it. So there are a couple of things you can do to increase the amount of calories that you eat. But before I get into that, in terms of how you eat your food and whatnot, I do want to say this. Force feeding yourself too often, probably not good for you. Your body is sending you a signal that's saying that you're getting enough food. Now unless you're ill or overtrained, like if you beat yourself up, you're overtrained, super fatigued, sometimes that'll cause you to not want to eat as well. But if you're otherwise healthy, you want to kind of listen to your body. And maybe what you want to do to start with is send a louder muscle building signal that then will amp up your appetite a little bit. So sometimes to get your appetite to increase, you got to change your programming. Your workout may be, you may be doing too much in your workout, or you may not be working out in a way that's building muscle effectively. One of the first signs of an effective resistance training workout is an increased appetite. Absolutely. So if you lift properly and you're starting to get stronger, you'll notice that your appetite starts to boost kind of naturally. Now that being said, there are a couple of things that you can do. I would say increase the amount of hyper-palatable foods that you eat. Yes. Throw some novelty in there so that way you get that contrast that maybe that'll help in terms of helping, you feel like you couldn't eat more just because it is a different flavor. It is something that's like a new stimulus. Stay away from foods that make you feel bloated. That's an appetite killer, because I didn't learn this until later, but I would stuff myself with certain foods and I, because I thought they were supposed to be good for muscle building and I'd get bloated and then forget it. That's like I couldn't eat for the rest of the day. So easily digestible food, this is a huge one for being able to eat more calories. If your digestion starts to go off, it's easy to not eat food when your digestion is off. It's hard to eat food when your digestion is off. So I would say focus on that. And then the last one would be drink some calories. This is probably the easiest possible thing you could do. If you're not dairy intolerant, a glass of milk with each meal, one glass of milk with each meal, boom, 300 calories, right there. If you are dairy intolerant, you could try full fat coconut milk or protein powders that you mix with the coconut milk and then drink that with a meal or in between meals. That's the old school approach. You know, old school bodybuilders used to do that. They would eat three big meals and then in between they'd have like a big shake but again, you have to digest it well because if you start to get bloated, you're gonna be totally screwed. A couple other little tips too. This is where I do see value in the six meals a day or whatever where you're breaking it up. Sometimes it's hard and I don't know where your caloric intake is at currently and where you're trying to get up to. But I definitely know that for when I was pushing four, 5,000 plus calories a day, it was extremely hard to do that. And even like four or five meals. Like this is, it required me to do six plus meals a day. And it's just easier. It's easier to put down a, you know, for me a four or 500 calorie meal, maybe for you it's a, you know, two, 300 calorie meal versus you trying to put down 700 calories in a single sitting. So that's one thing that helped me was breaking the meals up and smaller, more frequent meals instead of the big, large meals. And the difference as far as health wise and all that is we're splitting hairs on that. So I don't think it's a big deal for you to do that. The other thing that helped me was eating more high glycemic carbohydrates early and lower in like saturated fats early on in my day and then allowing that later on in the evening. So I chose leaner meats early on and things that were lower in fat. And then I piled that on in the evening time. And by piled on I just mean, you know, I chose to have the steak or the chicken thighs or butter on whatever veggies or something that I'm eating. I did that later on in the evening when I was like my last meal or my last two meals. And earlier in the day, I kept things like oatmeal and rice and fruit. This all seemed to stimulate my appetite and keep me wanting the next, you know, small meal that was coming up in an hour or two. That really helped me push the calories in. If I had a big, heavy, you know, bacon and egg type of breakfast, which I enjoy and I eat that way now because I'm trying to stay satiated. The problem with that is it would keep me so satiated that I didn't want to eat for another three, four plus hours versus when I had like oatmeal, blueberries and whey protein, I'm hungry an hour later, I'm ready to eat again. So those strategies helped me. Yeah, and here's something else to consider when you, if you are splitting up your meals, I think people, they think they have to have a balanced, what I mean by balanced is carbs, proteins, fats, meal each time they split their meals up. It doesn't have to be that way. Something that I would do, because I used to be able to do this. I could, if I was kind of full, I could still eat a bowl of carbs. So what I would do is a breakfast, lunch and dinner or my proteins, fats and veggies, meals in between were bowl of rice or, you know, bowl of cereal or my carbs. Those were really easy. And then, and then because I'd go through them so quickly in terms of digestion or whatever, an hour or two later, I was ready for my protein and fat, you know, main meal. So your meals don't all have to look like, you know, I have my starches, I have my proteins, I have my fats. You can split them up however you want and eat them up, eat them throughout the whole day or whatever to get those extra calories in. But number one, like get your, your body needs to want to build muscle. And once it wants to build muscle, your appetite will naturally go up. The whole force feeding yourself thing, I get it sometimes, but if this is you all the time, you got to ask yourself why your body doesn't want to eat these, these calories. What's going on? Is it your digestion? Is it your workout? Because it's like starving yourself all the time. It's the same, although it's on the opposite end of the spectrum, it's not good for you. Well, I was just gonna bring up how interesting that is to me too. Like you ever noticed like it's so hard to cut extremely hard. It's so hard to like aggressively bulk. I mean, your body has these, this natural calorie range that it wants to be in and anything left of it and anything right of it is so hard, but finding that like- That's a big stretch. It is, it's so, when you're, when you are pushing your limits like this, and I think what you said at first Sal was so important that that wasn't something that I probably noticed until later on and really piece that together, how important it was to switch my programming up. Sometimes just that in itself, I mean, if you haven't trained certain lifts or you've been following the same similar type of routine and just completely throwing a curve ball at the body it does tend to stimulate the appetite.