 Question is from caffeine and counseling. If someone is having a hard time losing body fat, how do they determine if it's due to a slow metabolism or just overeating? Okay, so first of all, if you are gaining weight or not burning body fat, you are eating more than you're burning. So it's technically all overeating, okay? So let's get that out. Now, that being said, okay, can you change the energy balance by speeding up your metabolism? In other words, can you get your body to burn more calories on its own using certain strategies to speed up your metabolism? Yes, you can. So I wanna be clear there because you only gain body fat if you're eating more calories than you're burning. Now, if you're not burning very many calories, it doesn't take much to do that, but you're still eating more than you're burning. The strategies to getting your metabolism to speed up all include lifting weights, all of them. Now, there's other things you can do. Get good sleep. You can slowly increase your calories over time that tends to speed up the metabolism a little bit, but you lift weights always because lifting weights tells the body to build muscle. It also sends a signal to the body. And this is something that we've never really talked too much about on the podcast. It actually tells your body to become less efficient with calories. We see this, and it's interesting, when you look at studies, you find that the body becomes less... In other words, it doesn't conserve calories quite as much. It burns more through heat because it doesn't feel like it needs to. Resistance training tends to promote that. So when you look at somebody who gains a pound of muscle but they're burning 500 more calories a day, one pound of muscle on its face isn't burning 500 more calories. But the signal that told the body to build that pound of muscle does tell the body to become less efficient with calories, which causes a faster metabolism. Well, wouldn't you first want to look at, if you're overeating? That would just make the most sense before you go into, well, I have a slow metabolism and go in that direction. Just to really know very specifically, I've been tracking, I know what my maintenance is. I know that just by manipulating this amount of calories up, I could see how that affects my composition and then sort of go from there and then see, okay, obviously the weight training is gonna have the best effect on your metabolism and you're gonna go in that direction but at least assess that first. Well, I mean, like Sal said, if you're putting on body fat, regardless if your metabolism is slow, you think it's slow or not slow, you're overeating, right? So you're overeating for where your current metabolism is at. And really, nobody knows the answer to whether it's slow to you or not. Like if you find yourself eating very low calorie and still putting body fat on, well, then, and you're not satisfied with the calories you're consuming and you would like to eat more, well, then sure, it's slow for you. It's slower than you would like it. So work towards building it up. But if you're putting body fat on, just because you had a crazy day where you had 12 alcoholic drinks and swung by a Taco Bell and had 20 tacos at the end of the night and you put on some body fat afterwards, I think because you ate 6,000 calories. I'm blaming on your metabolism. It's not the metabolism fault, but I mean, you are the one that decides whether you think your metabolism is slow or not. If you're putting body fat on, you're overeating. Whether regardless of that's 900 calories you're eating from that, or it's 6,000 calories, you won't put body fat on unless you're over consuming than where your metabolic rate is from that. Now, here's where the value of tracking comes in because nine out of 10 people that I've ever worked with underestimate their calories, okay? Almost every single time somebody will say, oh, I'm eating around this much or I'm not eating too much. And then I have them tracking back. Actually, you're eating 3,500 calories a day on average. Why? Because yeah, you had a couple of low calorie days, but then Saturday and Sunday, you ate pizza and you went out and you did this and that. When we add it all up, it averages out to quite a bit. So track, track your food, see how many calories you're actually consuming. You may be surprised. You may be shocked. You may think you have a, I can't tell you how many times I had clients tell me that slow metabolisms, but in reality, they just ate too much. They just ate a shitload of calories. I'm like, well, you're actually eating a lot more than you think.