 Our next caller is Megan from Florida. Hey, what's up Megan? How can we help you? Hey guys, first off, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking my question today. I recently started listening to you guys religiously and I actually just purchased Maps Anabolic. Long story short, I'm a 410, 15 pound female and I have been working out for quite some time. However, I didn't discover macros weightlifting and all of that fun stuff until about 2017. Also, at that time, I've almost always had a trainer since 2017. However, I recently decided to venture out on my own with training macros and calories. These last set of trainers that I had who I have the utmost respect for and they actually are a big part of how I found you guys discovered how low my calories have been. And for about a full year, I basically did quote unquote recovery with them. My calories were as low as sometimes a thousand calories a day, the highest probably about 1300. My calories got up with these trainers up until about 1800, but I felt terrible on them, which I was very verbal about with them. I've done gluten free, I've done dairy free. I did gain some weight, which I was prepared for, but I am one of those females that really watches the scale and kind of has a hard time letting go of that number. So I did sort of resist them a little bit. As we were about to start a cut, I did have to end my contract with them because my husband and I actually moved overseas. And so basically, here's my question. Despite trainer help, despite eating well, following good habits, I cannot seem to build muscle no matter what I do. I can't ever seem to lose my love handles or my lower stomach, basically. I've also been told previously that petite women have to eat less because we are so small and keep calories relatively low because it's so hard for us to lose weight. So what do you guys recommend for petite women? The last part's false. I don't know if you've ever seen female gymnasts, they're like, smaller than you are, and just, you know, here's a deal, by the way. What you're explaining is most people, especially most women, building muscle is not easy at all. It's very hard. It's a slow, long process, even for men, especially for women. So it can definitely be very frustrating. Now here's the thing that I want to address. You talked about eating more and you didn't feel good. And then you talked about cutting out dairy and gluten. So I'm assuming when you said you didn't feel good, you noticed digestive issues. Is that correct? Okay. So I would address the digestive issues. You may have an underlying digestive issue that needs to get addressed and gut inflammation and gut health issues are a massive wrench in progress. I know this personally, okay? It always gets in my way when it comes to my ability to build muscle, improve my performance, even burn body fat. And when my gut health is good, it's like I'm a completely different person. So I would highly suggest working with somebody who's an expert in this field, maybe a functional medicine practitioner. And I think this will be one of the best investments you can make if you can address those gut issues, because then you can increase your calories, work towards building muscle, and you probably will get a better hormone profile. Some of the stuff that you're talking about, like not being able to burn body fat from certain areas, not being able to build muscle that may be related to hormone issues caused by gut issues as well. And then the last thing I want to say is always listen to your body. So just because you think you're supposed to eat X amount of calories, but you feel better eating less, then that's fine. You can eat less, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But because of the digestive issues, I would say let's focus on that first. I think if we get that out of the way, you'd be very pleasantly surprised at how much differently your body responds. A good investment would be Dr. Stephen Cabral. He has a program that he does and I know he can do it virtually with you. That can be expensive, so you can do this on your own. If you have the discipline to do like an elimination diet, you could go that route. But Stephen Cabral would be amazing to help you with the gut. The other thing that I would suggest too, that I don't know if you were doing with the other trainer or not, is when you decide to go in the caloric surplus, is to give yourself breaks. We always advocate many cuts and many bulks. And so if I had someone like you and we were only at 1,000 calories and we're 1,800, that's a significant difference. That's double. So I would do something more like 1,500. We'd be running that consistently for a week or two. And then I'd give you two or three days where we'd actually drop the calories significantly and then go back up to the bulk. And so I'd kind of give your digestive system a little bit of a break by actually having some low calorie days intermittently in there. So even though the goal is to increase the calories, get you eating more, I would still break it up with these days. And you might have just been consuming so high for so long consistently that that's also what was bothering your digestive system too. Yeah. And again, it may be the kinds of foods you're eating and maybe that you need to treat something like SIBO or maybe work on motility, which would be more of a specific type of application. But if you don't get that out of the way, it's going to be very challenging with everything else, especially if those gut issues persist. But here's the good news. Once they get addressed, man, the change in how your body responds and how you feel is like, it's really, it really is night and day. It makes a huge difference. Now, when you were gaining weight, did you feel though that you're stronger at that point too, or was this? Yeah, what did that look like? I did. I did. I wouldn't say that I was going crazy in the gym. But I mean, I was lifting. I was deadlifting. And I, you know, like I look back at my app that I logged all of my workouts in and I realized that as I was eating more, I was lifting heavier. So I understand that correlation, things like that. One thing I did want to bring up, you guys mentioned hormones, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism about a year ago. However, that particular doctor, I didn't really do my research. And he was just one of those doctors that, oh, it's this. So here's this medicine. And he put me on a thyroid medicine. And then I actually went and had some blood work done. I came off the thyroid medicine. And I had blood work done, post that, and it, my thyroid levels were fine. And so I'm a little worried that maybe being on that medicine messed up some hormones. I don't know if that's, I don't know a whole lot about hormone health. So I'm not real sure. Dr. Stephen Cabral, Dr. Becky Campbell would be another person you can work with. But so you could have normal thyroid, but you could have antibodies so that the thyroid that you are producing just isn't working, or there could be a dysfunction somewhere else, or, or it could literally be coming from the gut and the in poor gut health will affect all of those things as well. So a functional medicine practitioner that really does a good job is worth their weight in gold. Okay. All right. All right. Thank you so much for calling in Megan. Hey, you know, thank you for taking my question. Yeah, I appreciate it. All right. Bye-bye. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of those things it's like, you know, if you have an underlying kind of issue, and it doesn't get addressed, it could feel like everything else that you're doing right is going to get louder and louder if you don't address. Yeah. And it just doesn't work. It's like, I've addressed workouts, I've addressed sleep, I've addressed, you know, this and, but what the hell is going on? It's like when we get guys, and they go to, you know, see their testosterone levels, and they're like, oh my God, my testosterone is low. No wonder everything that I was doing, you know, just wasn't working. You know, this is where an investment in someone like Cabral would be amazing. Totally. To me, it's a kind of a no brainer for so long. And it sounds like she can afford it. She's hired personal trainers and she's invested in her health before. So I think investing in someone like taking someone like him for a couple of months, I think would do wonders for where she's at.