 Question is from Maxibon Jr. Do macros really matter? Absolutely. Not at all. They definitely matter. It's important to know what is in your food, know what, so macronutrients are proteins, fats, and carbs. And those three macronutrients, macro meaning big, because then you have micronutrients, which are things like your vitamins and your phytonutrients and stuff like that. But each macronutrient has a specific function in the body, and two of them are essential. Okay, what that means is the two essential macronutrients are proteins and fats. And if you don't eat enough of either one of those, you'll have some pretty bad health consequences leading up to eventual death. Possibly. I mean, you could go so far as to cause your body to break down. So two of those are essential. So you, at the very minimum, want to know what your minimum intake or requirements are for both proteins and fats. Well, and how often did you guys, especially later in our career, when in this probably you, you probably became more aware of this, but how often did you assess a diet and go like, oh, wow, this is probably why you feel this way. Your fats are extremely low. Right. Or you're not getting enough protein. Well, no wonder we're not building any muscle. Totally. And so this is where macros really do matter. Now, it's funny because it's actually, I was actually just thinking about doing a post around this. This is great that we're going in this direction. If all you cared about was losing 10 pounds on the scale, just 10 pounds on the scale, then it doesn't matter as much. The thing that matters the most is calorie restriction. It's going from X amount of calories, reducing that by 500 to 1,000 calories every single day or creating more calorie expenditure and you will lose weight. Now the problem with that and what I would see a lot with people that did this, and this is common when you get clients that switch from eating bad food and by bad, I mean fast food and tons of sugar and processed foods and then also they go to salads and chicken breast and eating like super low calorie and then running on the treadmill and then they lose 10 pounds. But then we test their body fat when they start and then we test their body fat again after they've lost this 10 pounds and you know what happens a lot of the time? They get fatter. As a percentage. Right, their body fat goes up and you're like, well, how's that work? How's that possible? They lost 10 pounds. How could you get fatty? Like how did the pause like that? I was like, I was trying to wait for it. It's fat, boom. Well, I mean how many people, I mean at least for me, this was common. Did you see that that just demoralized them? How many clients, I mean I used to have clients where we would do like the hydrostatic way or body fat test and even though I was telling them to follow something, they were still kind of doing their own thing. Going, doing more cardio, pushing harder, restricting calories, they turned it into a game. Can I work harder? Can I restrict even more than what Adam's saying? And then we would remeasure a month later and they're down 10 pounds on the scale and they think they're winning and they look at the body fat percentage and it goes up and then they look at me and they're like, what the fuck? Well, how is that possible? How is that possible? If you lose 10 pounds of muscle mass but kept the same amount of fat mass on your body, that total fat mass now is a larger percentage of your overall body weight. And you don't even need to do that. All it has to be is one more pound over it. So you could actually lose four pounds of fat but you lost six pounds of muscle and your body fat percentage will go up. That's right, because it's the percentage, right? If you took the body fat of somebody who's, if you took someone a 10% body fat but they weigh 120 pounds and you take their body fat and put it on someone who's got 200 pounds of lean body mass, they're gonna be shredded because it's about percentage. So that's a very good point. The other thing you wanna pay attention to is this, is besides the minimum requirements of the essential macronutrients, proteins and fats, there's also optimal amounts of especially proteins. Studies are pretty conclusive on this. If you wanna maximize the muscle building effects of protein when you combine it with resistance training, you wanna eat roughly 0.6 to one gram of protein per pound of body weight if you're a relatively lean individual. If you're really overweight, then you wanna use your lean body mass. This is where you take your body fat percentage, remove the body fat from your weight. Now you have your lean body mass. Studies show this pretty consistently. Eating within this range means you're gonna build more muscle, which means, you know, indirectly you'll have a faster metabolism and you'll typically get better results. Protein is also more satiating. So if you eat a higher protein diet as a percentage of your overall calories, you're more likely to eat less calories. Now part of this is because protein itself is satiating. The other part of it is because oftentimes in a person's diet, protein is where they get their whole natural foods. If you look at the average person's diet and you were to just categorize their food in two categories, heavily processed and unprocessed. Most of the proteins would be the unprocessed foods. In fact, that might be the only things that they eat that are unprocessed. And unprocessed foods tend to also be quite satiating. But you know, there's this thing about macros and calories. It's that, you know, they're important things to understand. You just don't wanna get stuck obsessing about them all the time. But that doesn't mean you ignore them. You wanna learn about them first. Yeah, I mean, like definitely calories are your first priority in terms of being able to make sure that you're under a certain amount if my goal is to lose weight. But to bring it back to your satiating point, that was a big one for me to be able to relay to my clients in terms of being able to satiate yourself. So that way you're not still eating calories and it makes it easier the process of being able to delay the hunger onset. And so for me to eat like that was always like a better strategy than to try and just like minimize the amount of calories and keep that like same balance of carbohydrates that I had before. Right, a 2000 calorie diet where the macros are not ideal means you're gonna feel worse. You're gonna have less energy, less strength, hungrier, maybe even worse mood. Versus a 2000 calories diet where the macros are ideal for your body, you're gonna feel much better. Now it's more complicated than that but those are the two big rocks that you gotta tackle first. It's calories and macros. Understand them and learn them. Then you can kind of move into a diet that's a little more relaxed. We'd have to look at those things so much. It's funny that the bodybuilding community gets a really bad rap for this but I actually really liked the way a lot of them do this and many bodybuilders don't even pay attention to calories. They only manage macros. And what ends up happening if you eat your macros, you're gonna eat your calories. Right, and that's all they focus on. They're not really worried if it's 20 or 30 calories north or south. That's less important to them as it is making sure that, okay, if I started off this muscle building program and I was allowing myself 300 grams of carbs, 120 grams of fat and 200 grams of protein, that's my starting point. And if I'm trying to build, I use typically carbohydrates or fats to increase those calories and you can interchange those if you want. If I'm trying to cut or reduce, I reduce from carbohydrates or fat and I can interchange those. And as long as I'm staying in a healthy range for my fat, I'm pretty good. And I think that learning to manage the diet that way, although it's a little more challenging for people, I think the lessons that you get from that that will carry over into long-term intuitive eating if you can eventually get there. Because I think you have to do those things first. That's the steps. Oh, that's part of the education. Yeah, if you're ever gonna get to a place of intuitive eating, I believe you have to get to a place where you're not only counting calories, you're also tracking macros. So you kind of get an understanding of what, I mean, in an example of why I think this is so important, I mean, over 10 years into my career of even counting calories, doing things, I actually had never done, I'd never weighed a sweet potato until I started competing. But in the past, when we started, this was well before, you know, fat secret, my fitness power, we used to have to, I had a book called Calorie King. I remember that. And I would have to, you know, flip through it and I would look down, it would be sweet potato. One medium sweet potato. Right, it would be small, medium or large. And I would look at a sweet potato and I've got like five of my, and I see what the large one is to me, that's the big one, and then I see what a small one is and then, oh, this must be a medium one. So I, you know, medium, that's, it's a medium in comparison to the three that I have at my house, this is a medium one. So I put them in, oh my God, you know, when I, when I started weighing it, I wasn't just kind of off, I was three X off. Yeah, the medium is like bigger than their large. Yeah, it's big, exactly. And so that was such an eye-opener for me. And, you know, I, so I was guesstimating my calories off by 300 plus calories just from that one food and that there's examples of that and all kinds of different. Remember the first time you weighed out five ounces of chicken breast? Oh yeah. You know, you get those big old, you know, monster chicken breast that they make. They're 10 ounces. Yeah, it's like a pound of chicken. You don't even realize it. And then you go, well, I need, I'm supposed to eat five. Let's see what five ounces look like. Half. Right, or you go to a big juicy steak at a restaurant, you know, that's like a 16-ounce steak, you know what I'm saying? Like, oh, that's probably like six or eight ounces. Yeah, so there's a lot of things that you, there's a lot of value you get in, you know, diligently tracking your macros. And I never recommend someone staying in that place to like Sal's point. I think you can become obsessive about it. I think that it could also lead to an unhealthy relationship with food. But there's a tremendous amount of value with tracking for a period of time for you to get a really good understanding. So at least you know when you go through your day, oh, I have a pretty good idea. I was eating about this much or I'm really low on my fats or I was really low yesterday on my fats. So today, I wanna make sure that I up those. And so I think that that's important. The true takeaway is that there's a maxibon senior.