 First question is from Chats with Gabby. How do you lose fat without losing muscle? I love this question because this is this should be your goal if you're trying to burn body fat your goal should not be Lose body fat and then whatever else happens is all good. Yeah, your goal should be lose body fat preserve muscle or in Really really perfect situations gain muscle now. Why why would you want that? if you keep your muscle, you're less likely to have the negative Metabolism adaptation what I mean by that is when you when you lose weight and lose muscle Metabolism starts to slow down which makes further weight loss or further fat loss more difficult It also makes the fat loss that you did get more difficult to maintain So you want to keep muscle because it keeps it helps promote a faster metabolism, which means you burn more calories all the time And it's protective. I mean like you get more strength from it But it's they're they're finding through those studies too about, you know The immune system and everything else like how protective it is to acquire more muscle. This is this is also why it's very important that you You build the metabolism up right by increasing calories before you decide to go in a cut because if you get a client Who is only eating? 1800 or 2000 calories and they have a long way to go fat loss wise and they come to you and they want to Do that and then you you dramatically cut them to say and that's not dramatic They're at 1800 1500 is not dramatic at all. So you cut them down to 1500 or 1400 calories What ends up happening is sure they might lose body fat because but that's not enough calories to support the muscle that they need on Their body either so you end up losing both muscle and and body fat at the same time And then that's where you see someone who loses and this used to happen a lot I remember when I used to have the hydrostatic way come to the gym all the time And we'd have them do all of our clients that are our trainers for training and you'd get Trainers and this it would happen a lot especially when they're a newer trainer They haven't learned this lesson yet They'd have a client that they you know threw on cardio cut their calories like crazy and you know They lost them 15 20 pounds and so the client celebrating their celebrating that they did a great job Then they go do the hydrostatic way and then the person comes back with a higher body fat percentage Yeah, and they go and they're like I lost weight Yeah, and then the clients like this has got to be wrong the trainers questioning if the hydrostatic way is correct or not No, it is and that's what happens when you cut too hard and you're not at a good sustainable place calorie wise You're not feeding the body enough nutrients to hang on to the muscle mass that you have and you're Telling the body to adapt to a lower cost so it pairs down muscle It says okay It's too expensive to keep this this muscle mass on on my body because they're feeding it so low of calories that Yeah, sure it does use and burn burn fat as fuel because you're not giving it very much fuel But then it also pairs down muscle because you're not feeding enough nutrients It's it's 100% your the reason why you lose muscle when you diet is because your body's Purposely trying to slow down its metabolism. It's purposely trying to run on less calories because you're feeding it less calories now this happens Almost every time what I mean by that is Almost every time you cut your calories your metabolism starts to try to slow down a little bit. It's a normal adaptation Nothing necessarily wrong with it. But again, if it happens too much you put yourself in a bad situation Now, how do you prevent this from happening? Well, the number one thing you do is you lift weights and you lift weights in ways That promote muscle growth and strength. So what I mean by that is you don't lift weights in ways to burn tons of calories So if I'm lifting weights and I'm just going doing, you know tons of circuits and going from one exercise to the other because I'm just I want to burn body fat. I just want to burn tons of calories You are sending somewhat of a muscle building signal, but not a super loud one The best thing to do is to build muscle and build strength or try to while cutting your calories What this does is it tells the body? Okay, we're taking we're not getting enough calories. We need to burn fat for fuel weight Should we pair down muscle? No, we need this muscle because we're getting a strong signal from Actions that we need muscle and we need strength. By the way studies are clear on this when people diet without exercise It's about half muscle that they lose when they lose 10 pounds It's usually around five pounds of muscle five and pounds of body fat. This is totally this is exactly what will happen If you don't lift weights properly while you're cutting your calories You know this this question reminds me of a great conversation that we had with our good buddy Jason Phillips In fact, this is when we really hit it off with him is when he did such a good job on that episode that we interviewed him of Explaining this and and how common is and honestly a lot of coaches Aren't privy or aren't savvy to coach through this or know what to do And that's one of the things I love about NCI is that this is one of the most important things that? Jason tries to teach to all of his coaches underneath him and when we had that episode with them This was we went deep into this this conversation So if you're listening to this and you have more questions and you want more detail Refer back to that episode that we did with Jason Phillips and check out NCI because this is something that they speak to a lot And they help coaches and trainers figure this piece out Which I think was one of the more challenging things for me because most of my career That's what I was teaching other trainers and then this is what would happen They would they would cut their clients and then they would see the body fat percentage go up And I'd have to constantly be reminding them that you know You've got to take this a lot a lot slower more methodical approach because you know now We have the tools to be able to check and pay attention to that in the past before all these tools existed You would think that you were a successful trainer client lost 20 pounds. They came in that's what they want to do They want to lose 20 pounds, but if you made them fatter you weren't that was successful And people that doesn't constantly be in their ear reassuring them This is the right approach and that doesn't it doesn't compute to the average person We just talked about like learning to communicate this right like you say that to an average person that wait a second How can I lose 20 pounds on the scale but get fatter? Well, it's because you didn't technically add fat to the body you because you have a higher percentage of fat Because you lost muscle because you lost more muscle than you actually lost body right So 10 pounds of body fat on a 100 pound person is 10% body fat 10 You know 8 pounds of body fat on a you know 70 per pound person is a higher body fat percentage Even though they're still less fat because there's less lean mass overall Here's the second thing you need to do if you want to prevent losing muscle eat a high protein diet So even though you're in a calorie deficit, you still want a higher percentage of your calories coming from protein Studies are consistent on this a high protein diet Reduces the amount of muscle that's lost in diet And when you lift up when you when you diet and when you lift weights along with the high protein Then the odds are higher that you might actually even build muscle So number one lift weights to build muscle build strength while you're on your calorie deficit number two eat a high protein diet That'll help a lot and here's number three I don't think it's a good idea to go too extreme in in fat or carb cutting in my experience Flattening out carbs going zero carbs unless it's helping you health wise and you have food intolerance stuff like that Going too low of carbs in my experience with clients over time Starts to reduce the ability of to build muscle even preserve muscle now studies aren't clear on this that don't necessarily support this This is just my own personal experience. I don't have anything wrong with low carb diets Necessarily, but if they're too low for too long I have seen people start to lose muscle on the behavior of that too when you go Reintroduce them and how like excessive it gets after that so