 Our first caller is Dwayne from Vietnam. Hey Dwayne, how can we help you? Hi, first of all I just want to say thank you to you guys for accepting me on this, on this little questionnaire and you guys do a brilliant job, I love listening to you and all your information that you put out there. My question today is, so I've only just recently started working out for probably about a year but I mainly did cardio, a bit of HIIT and cardio here and there, body weight training and I've only just started experimenting with barbell training, maybe in the last three months or so. I also just recently started tracking food because I had a really bad relationship with food and my body, I was just eating anything and then nothing at all. So tracking calories is making me identify how much I should be eating and also gain muscle. I've also used your tracker on your website to identify how much I'm nutrient to how many nutrients I should be consuming. I've linked my fitness file to Google Fit, so it calculates how much I walk. I surf every week, I do mountain climbing, I also do long walks. So I should be consuming according to the calculates about 2,500 calories a day but if I do my activities it comes to, it says Google Fit tells me that I should, that I've burned 800 plus calories. So my question is, should I be consuming 2,500 plus the 800 calories that I've burned or should I just stick to 2,500 because I don't feel like there's numbers of rights. I feel like I'm putting on a little bit more fat than I should be. The scales are not really moving in my favor so I'm a bit a little bit confused and I wanted your guys opinion on that. Dwayne, how big are you? What's your size? I'm fairly light. I'm 5'7". I used to be 72 kilos. I'm now 61.5". And have you been, like all the exercise that you've been doing, the activities that you've been doing, have you been consistently doing that for quite some time? Yes, I've walked about 12,000 steps for at least about a year now and I've recently started taking up dancing, mountain climbing and surfing in the last month or so. So I've just added on to that. That's a lot of activity for only 2,500 calories. Or is it? Okay. Oh yeah. I mean, even though your size, okay, so you're not over 200 pounds, 2,500 calories for someone who is doing 12,000 plus steps a day plus all the activity that you're doing is a lot in the first place. But you feel like you're putting on body fat by just eating 2,500 calories? Yeah, that's what I don't understand. I feel like my lower belly has gained a little bit more body fat than it used to. And then what does the strength training look like right now? I'm doing it five days a week. Just this compound lifts really. I'm new to it, so I'm doing my chest two days, legs two days and one day I do four. So five days a week. So I would run something more similar to MAPS anabolic where you're doing strength training only two or three times a week. And all of the stuff that you're doing, is it something that you don't want to stop doing because you love hiking and going outdoors and doing all this stuff? Or are you open to scaling some of that back and putting more focus and energy towards the strength? I'm okay just scaling back to be quite honest because I am fairly tired. I think the lack of sleep as well is not probably helping me in any way. I have a few more questions for you Dwayne. You said you had a bad relationship with food. What did that look like? Were you somebody that was really skinny so your relationship with food was to eat more to try and bulk up or were you someone that was worried about having too much body fat so you were restricting? I was really skinny fat to be honest. I had a beer belly and stuff. I was a really thin guy overall but I had a beer belly and I just gave up at one point and ate everything and I just gained more and more fat. About a year ago I decided I wanted to completely shred that fat so then I just cut down my calories massively and I ate the same thing for about six months. It was oats in the morning and then boiled chicken and eggs and that's it. That's what I knew. I thought that was the way to go forward. The last six months has been a complete change where I'm starting to learn nutrition and I can't do that to myself. How do you feel tracking calories and adding things up and adding up steps right now because you know all these numbers so it sounds like you're pretty meticulous. Is that making you feel better or is it adding a little stress to your life? Yes. No, no, no. I absolutely love it. I can sit the whole day and do it because I learned so much in terms of how much a strawberry has and how much a kiwi fruit has and stuff like that. It's kind of one of my passions so it's something I really enjoy. Okay, so there's nothing wrong with informing yourself with what food has and how many grams of protein you need and carbohydrates and fats and that kind of stuff but here's what I'm hearing from you. I feel like you're just taking the obsession to a different level which might be healthier than it was before but I don't think meticulous tracking is a good idea. In fact, what I would recommend if you were my client, if you were my client I would move you away from tracking and I would have you completely pay attention to performance so strength, are you getting stronger and how do you feel? You mentioned earlier that you're really fatigued and tired so that would be a sign that you're either not eating enough or you're exercising too much and not giving yourself ample time to recover so I would look at strength and health, sleep, libido, mood, skin, digestion and I would stop placing focus on all these numbers aside from your strength because the relationship you have with food if it was bad before, getting into the numbers and obsessing over them can actually make it just as bad. It might feel better because the foods you're eating might be a little more balanced but when I hear from you that you ate the same thing every day for six months that makes me say okay, probably want to pull back from counting calories, counting macros, counting steps, maybe go live your life a little bit, enjoy your workouts and pay attention like I said, am I stronger? Can I deadlift more? Can I bench press more? Do I feel more energetic? And rather than using the numbers metrics, use those metrics, focus on those things. Have you ever done a straight one-to-five rep range kind of straight set approach and just focused on that and saw where that took you? Yes, I've recently started tracking in terms of how much I'm lifting as well and if I gradually increase every week and again it's only been maybe the last month or so but I do see a gradual increase in terms of the reps and the sets I'm doing. Right, in terms of the rest in between I'm just wondering because I know a lot of times I've had clients who've done the compound lifts but haven't really applied enough of that rest period to really focus on just the strength portion of it and not trying to get through the workouts. So if I'm doing about 10 reps I normally take about a minute and a half to about two minutes of a break and then start again or do the remaining of the sets that I need to do that's the normal kind of gap I have in between. That's not bad, I think that's okay and I think Sal has got the best advice with moving away from tracking so much but I do want to address the fact that you've done that so I do like that because it brings awareness to where you're kind of at and when you told the rest of the story to Sal I'll make the sense to you for why this is happening so why do you feel like 2,500 calories and you're putting on body fat? Because you ate oats and eggs and boiled chicken for six months I mean you're talking about probably 1,000 calories right there at most and then with all the activity that you were doing sure you probably lost some weight doing that but you also trained your metabolism to slow down so your metabolism adapted to that calorie intake of 1,000 calories with 12,000 plus steps a day and so anything above 1,500 calories probably does feel like it's putting body fat on you so we can address that's the reason why you feel that way but then I would also agree with Sal that let's not get hung up so much on that's an issue and start cutting the calories and go way back down let's start going off of how you feel and pulling back on the five days of training your body type, where you're at what you're trying to accomplish again, maps and a block if you don't have maps and a block do you own it or no? No, I've just got the no BS ads I just recently purchased it last week and I've got Sal's nutrition guide which I really want to read Okay, so we're going to send maps and a block over to you I want you to follow that I actually want you to start with just two days a week start with two days a week full body routine follow the program as it's written and it's laid out scale back on some of the crazy amount of activity that you're doing outdoors and stuff like that as far as steps I don't want you to sit on the couch and be lazy from that I mean, enjoy your life Just do activity that you enjoy Don't be active for exercise be active for things you enjoy there's nothing wrong with that but I think what we're trying to do is move you away from a mentality and a mindset that's going to lead you down the wrong path so here's the thing for the next three months just focus on getting stronger and then as far as activity is concerned just do stuff you enjoy don't worry about tracking your steps just do stuff that you enjoy and have fun but focus on getting stronger for the next few months after the next few months then go ahead and see what your body fat percentage is see how you weigh and all that stuff and I bet you'll be pleasantly surprised especially if you take the advice and sound that you grab the intuitive guy so when you read that that's exactly the angle that Sal's going so it's going to move you away from weighing and measuring and tracking your food and starting to learn to just kind of listen to your body eat when you're hungry feed yourself correctly and pay attention to the signals that make your body feel good so read that and follow that as your guideline for nutrition and then stick to about a two to three day a week strength training okay so would you recommend that I immediately start doing the intuitive guides or like just stop attacking the intuitive guide yeah the intuitive guide is going to go into more depth with essentially what I'm talking about but really focus on strength make that your goal because here's the deal like I said I've worked with a lot of people and it sounds like you'll set yourself with a goal and you'll be very focused on it so we can't just take your focus off of one thing and then not let it go anywhere else because it's going to find something so take your focus and place it squarely on strength I want to get stronger in the next three months I want to be able to deadlift this much I want to be able to squat this much focus on that and then the intuitive guide will help you with the nutrition part okay Patrick thank you guys no problem no problem yeah it's um you know for most people getting them to figure out calories and macros is a great step for some people it's the wrong direction it just puts you in the wrong direction some people you kind of got to rain back a little bit like he seems like you know somebody that's going to pursue a goal and do it down to the last dotted line and you know it's very focused and so like a lot of times you just need somebody else an outside perspective to kind of say hey why don't we try focusing more on recovery and maybe backing off a little bit well there is a very positive part of him tracking though because it gives us that insight had he not tracked like that I wouldn't be able to know if he's eating low or not he could be just totally underestimating or overestimating but as soon as he told me he's taking and he feels like he's gaining fat and the amount of activity that he's doing between five days of training all the outdoor activity 12,000 steps a day right away I go okay that's super low calorie I mean I what he should be at is probably closer to 3,500 at least calories just to maintain much less put on buddy so that right away gave that away when Sal started asking more questions about his relationship with food and then we find out oats, hard boiled eggs and boiled chicken that would be a thousand calories yeah you're talking about super low calorie right there and while doing all that activity I mean he's just as slow as metabolism yeah I can't tell you how many times I got and this is a hard conversation to have it's a hard thing to convince someone to do but I can't tell you how many times I had clients take their focus entirely off the mirror off the scale I would tell people take your scale put it in the closet don't weigh yourself at all for the next three months we're going to focus entirely on strength and health and then at the end of that three month period let's bring out the scale let's test your body fat just to see what would happen and they would always be blown away I got leaner I dropped 4% body fat this is wild or oh my god my weight is the same on the scale but I dropped all this body fat and gained this muscle I had no idea this would happen yeah as a coach I mean your job is just reassurance that you're doing the right thing like they need to hear that constantly somebody like this