 Did you know eating too little can actually make you fatter? No, it's totally true. There's many reasons why eating too little will actually cause you to be fatter than you are now. That's what we're going to talk about today. I can't wait to see the TikTok clip of that. I know. At a contest, parts of the... This is a whole podcast, by the way. Don't just listen to it. Yeah, exactly. Please listen, yeah. We're going to break this down as to why this can happen and how this happens. And by the way, for anybody who's watching who's been training people for 10 years or more, you've seen this happen. Inevitably, you've seen people in this situation. Either that or you're still stuck in the phase that I think I was in for a long time where you just think like, That's why I said 10 years. Yeah, all your clients lie to you. I swear to God, everybody lies to you. Yeah, totally. So there's some interesting phenomena that happens when you eat too little for too long. And then there's some behavioral things that happen. And so we're going to kind of address all of those. But the first thing to understand with this is fatter doesn't necessarily mean heavier. And I want to say that because you can lose weight and actually become fatter as a percentage of your body weight. So if you were a 200-pound male and you were 10% body fat, that means that you have 20 pounds of body fat on your body. But let's say you lost 20 pounds of muscle, but you lost no body fat. So you lost, you still have 20 pounds of body fat on your body, but now you weigh 180 pounds. Your body fat percentage is now higher because 20 pounds is a higher percentage of 180 pounds than it is of 200 pounds. And you'll look fatter. In extreme cases, obviously 20 pounds of body fat and a 100-pound individual would be, would look very different than on a 200-pound individual. So this is a big one, and we've seen this ourselves. I experienced this as somebody who's a fitness fanatic. I remember losing weight and actually having my body fat percentage go up and how confusing that was. Oh, and it was like, you got angry. How can this be possible? I know this was always a tough one for clients, a tough pill to swallow, especially when they've been working so hard at losing weight and overall weight. And then to find out that their body now comprised mainly of body fat and they've actually lost muscle in this process was a frustrating thing. But this is where that whole term like skinny fat and all that kind of came out of. Exactly. Did you have a story about this? Well, I have a couple of stories, but the one that I'm thinking about right now that where I realized how much of a problem this was not just with our clients, but actually with my coaches and trainers that were teaching my clients. So I ran this competition. And I can't remember if Justin, you were part of it. Yeah, I was part of it. Were you part of the first one? I couldn't remember if you were with me at the first one or not. So we ran this competition where I used to do this where I had a friend who owned the fitness wave, the dunk tank. So hydrostatic way. Yeah, there's a mobile one in the Bay Area. In fact, they had the rights to all in California and we became friends. And when I found out that that was one of the most accurate ways to find body fat percentage. And so I ran this competition amongst my trainers. And this was an annual thing that I would do every year. So I did this for many years. But I remember the first year I did this, how shocking it was for all of my trainers. I had more than half of my trainers get fatter according to the body fat professionals that know how to diet and know how to train that came back. And I remember seeing that many going like, oh, shit, is this thing broken? Is it not working? They were doing the most extreme workouts you can think of, the most extreme eating. Their nutrition was just super restrictive. That's the thought, man, we're going to kill this competition. Yeah. And so it blew my mind. But that really opened my eyes that, wow, if a bunch of professionals that understand nutrients, understand building muscle, understand fat loss, understand exercise science failed at this when there was money behind it in a competition for three months. And it wasn't a lack of discipline or hard work towards the goal, it was a lack of knowledge and understanding on how to approach it and the best way to go about it. And it really opened my eyes to like, wow, if this is happening to my staff, who's then teaching my clients, how much is this, permeating the entire industry of clientele that are trying to lose body fat. And so that was a very pivotal point in my career. It was probably like year six or so into being a manager and managing trainers. It really shifted the way I looked at caloric balance, training intensity, diet intensity, like how hard you cut, like all these things. More muscle building and from the very beginning. Yes. Weight loss. And this happened to me too, by the way. So I'm including myself. Same. I was going to reiterate that. I got fatter. I was pissed. I was like, how is that possible? Yeah, I lost 10 pounds. I was so baffled by it. And what it was was I had lost an equal amount of muscle as I did fat. And because I'm now a smaller version of myself and I lost exactly five pounds of fat and five pounds of muscle, technically the body fat percentage went up because now it's a smaller percentage of me because I'm a smaller version of me. So I learned this both ways. I did the same thing where I lost weight and I did the same thing. I was overtrained, you know, cut my calories too aggressively. Body fat percentage went up a little bit and I was like, what the hell is going on? I did the math and I'm like, oh my God, I lost muscle. Then I had an experience in the opposite where I went on a bulk and I tested my body fat just for the hell of it within the beginning stages of the bulk. Got leaner. Yeah, same here. And I did the math. I remember doing the math and I said, how is this possible? This is crazy. I did the math and it's like, oh, I have the same amount of body fat on my body because when you do your percentage, you can figure out loosely how much like pounds of body fat you have versus lean body mass. Lean body mass is everything that's not body fat. And I remember I gained, I don't remember what a four pounds of lean body mass is to say, my body fat went down though because I didn't gain any body fat. So it wasn't that I didn't gain body fat. I didn't lose body fat either. Yeah. It just went down as a percentage of my overall body weight. So gaining lean body mass, pure muscle, is actually one effective way of lowering your body fat percentage. Not only that, but then you also in turn just sped up your metabolism. Oh yeah. And then all the positive stuff. Yeah. I mean the exact same thing happened to me as I remember going on a bulk after that and it was just like, what the hell? I'm eating to gain, yet now I'm leaning out and the opposite was what it was going on before and I failed that. I mean, there was a lot of trainers I had that were in denial. I mean, for the longest time they just swore it was broken. Oh, it doesn't work. But I look leaner, I'm lighter. But they had the breakdown, which was so great to what you're talking about. Like we didn't even have to do the math. It tells you water. It tells you lean body mass, fat mass, everything. So it was clear. You could see exactly what happened. Like, okay, I lost 15 to 20 pounds on the scale but a higher percentage of it was muscle. Why? Well, because I overtrained and under eight at high intensity for six to eight weeks and six to eight weeks of low calorie and punishing my body well it resulted in my body paring down muscle at as fast of a rate that I was burning body fat. And there you go. I got a higher body fat percentage even though you and that's why it's deceiving is you look smaller and leaner. I look as I lost some fat. So my belly fat had gone down a little bit and that my waist was smaller. Also you lose water because you're probably cutting carbs. Yeah. But it's but then you've been then when you actually are honest with yourself because we play games with ourselves, right? Yeah. How often is the reflection of the mirror? Do you look at it objectively versus subjectively? Well, for a lot of people who are struggling with weight loss if they just lose weight on the scale they'll look in the mirror and be like, oh, I'm smaller. I must be leaner. But it's like, no, you're actually flabbier because you lost muscle. Yeah, I was just kind of laughing myself because I remember even my me going into that dunk tank I was like, it must be the technique. You know, it must not be like getting rid of enough ice. I'm too buoyant, you know. Like basically drowning myself at that point trying to get better numbers. Yeah. And it just I couldn't like deal with the fact that I remember what I did the same thing. I remember asking him, right? Because we were friends. I'm like, what's the name? His name was Aaron. I was like, Aaron, I was like, if if I'm really good at letting air out and someone's really bad at it, like what? I mean, can you make a huge difference? And he's like, well, huge in comparison to this, but like, you know, 0.25. No, I know. Yeah. He's like 100%. Yeah. He's like the most you could possibly do of the worst and the best person to be a discrepancy of like 0.25. I'm like, okay, so if it's off, it ain't that far. No, I did the same thing. I'm gonna try and drown myself. Yeah. Did you do that where you went underneath it? Yes. It was like retching. Yeah. You gotta let all your air out. You know what I'm saying? It's stupid. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm like, yeah, I'm not telling you anything else yet. You know what, I was like, you basically had to deal with what I was doing with this YouTube algorithm and subscribe to this channel. And then again, turn on notifications do all those things. If we declare the winner, we'll let you know in the comments section. That you won the RGB bundle. Also, we're running a sale right now. We put together a workout program bundle called the time crunch bundle. That includes maps. 15 minutes maps anywhere. Maps prime. And the ebook eat for performance. at the top of the description below. All right, here comes the show. Yo, what's funny about this is one of my, later on when I became good at what I was doing, one of my hallmark successful, wonderful techniques at getting someone who would come to me who struggled with weight loss, who struggled with fat loss, had been going low calorie forever, in the excessive cardio forever. One of my favorite things to do was have them bump their calories, bump their protein, stop the cardio, lift weights, and then show them getting leaner. And it would blow their mind. This was the beginning of the philosophy that you heard me talk about in the show all the time of I began to stop ever putting people on restrictive diets and I began adding to the diet. That became my, no matter how much weight you had to lose, I don't care how big you were, I looked at and assessed your diet and I added food into the diet. And there's a behavioral aspect to it as well. Right, and that was what I learned afterwards, but the original reason why I did it was because what I learned from the- Show them a mind blowing. Yeah, and then also then I saw what happens with the behavioral stuff, and it was just like, oh my God, this is the answer. Which by the way, it's interesting to me that this is not the industry norm. It's not, it's still like, we still have this- Way far behind. We still have this cut calories and burn like crazy mentality to lose body weight, and it's not the best strategy. Energy management and having good workouts and like there's just so many benefits to having this approach versus the other. The behavioral aspects are the most important, but the data is clear on this. If you, when they do studies on people who just cut calories, they lose a significant amount of muscle, oftentimes as much muscle as body fat. When they add cardio to it, it gets worse. When they add cardio plus other exercise, it's still not good. Resistance training plus diet seems to be the best approach where you tend to hold on to the most muscle. Sometimes you can even lose muscle like that though, because the signal to build muscle can still be overcome with too low of calorie. So that brings us to the first point, which is this. If you eat too little, you'll lose muscle. And when you lose muscle, you slow down your metabolism. You're actually getting rid of or reducing your capacity to burn calories on your own. You're actually making it harder for yourself down the line. So even if you do lose more body fat than muscle, but you still lost a significant amount of muscle, now you set yourself up so that in the future, it's gonna be harder for you to continue and to maintain. So, and by the way, losing muscle, again, if you lose muscle and you don't lose body fat and you lose weight on the scale, you're fatter now. You're fatter, you have a higher body fat percentage. People get so hung up with the scale, I think it really screws people up. The example I used to tell people, I used to love using this example. Someone would come to me and they'd say, I just wanna lose 30 pounds on scale. I'd say, well, do you wanna lose fat or muscle? And they'd say, well, I don't care. How much, I don't care, I just wanna lose weight. Like, well, we could cut your leg off and they'd always look at me and laugh because it's true, right? It's not just about weight, it's the body fat that you wanna get rid of. I mean, your body has these natural mechanisms in place for survival. And we just always, I don't know, we always try and go against that fact. Like the fact is, like we need, our body's trying to preserve itself, trying to provide it with adequate energy to keep doing what it needs to do, but us trying to basically restrict our calories and not feed it, but then still give it all this work demand and load, especially when muscle is an expensive tissue and it's not necessary, extra muscle is not necessary to have. And so your body's gonna be like, that's the first to go. It's like, we don't need this. Why am I gonna keep it around? You're not feeding me what it takes to keep it. You're not stimulating it the way you're supposed to. So I'm getting rid of it. That's right. And then the example I gave of how you could actually build muscle, gain no body fat, but get a little heavy on the scale, but still be leaner, because now that body fat that you have is a smaller percentage. When your calories are too low, good luck trying to build muscle. Your body could have all the muscle building signal in the world, but if your calories are too low, if your proteins are too low, if your essential fats are not where they need to be, building muscle is impossible. It's like giving a bunch of construction workers plans to build a house. It's like, they show up, you got 50 workers, we're here to build a house, here's your plan. No wood. No wood, no bricks, no concrete, no nothing. Build it. It's like, we can't, we don't have the building blocks. So eating too little makes this impossible. And then the second part, which is I already kind of mentioned, is you've slowed your metabolism down. One of the fastest ways to get your body to learn how to burn less calories is to eat way less than you need, or eat too low of calories, and then simultaneously, not strength train. You lose that muscle, even if you don't lose a muscle, by the way, your body actually starts to adapt a little bit. And I've said this so many times on the podcast. There's a range of calories that your body can burn with the same lean body mass that you have. Your body can learn to be more or less efficient with calorie storage, calorie burning, and just getting your body to think it needs to lose muscle. Even before it loses muscle, you'll start to see metabolic adaptation. Now, if you lose muscle, now you've lost physical capacity to burn calories. And a slower metabolism makes it much harder in a modern society where you're surrounded by food and so on, right? So, I mean, it makes sense. I could use this as an example. I could snap my fingers and increase everybody's metabolism. Right now, listening to this by 50%, everybody would lose weight. Everybody would get leaner as a result. You don't want a slower metabolism unless you're living in the wilderness and you're hunting and foraging for your own food, in which case a slow metabolism is beneficial. But if you live anywhere in any kind of modern society, a slow metabolism is not an asset, it's a liability. You want a body that burns lots of calories on its own because you're probably gonna be sitting a lot. You're probably not gonna be moving a lot. You're probably gonna eat more than you should. There's tasty food, it's very convenient. Fast metabolism is a wonderful buffer against all of that stuff. And eating too little for too long, especially in combination with- Losing muscle. Lots of cardio or not strength training, you're going to get a slower metabolism. There's a study that I refer to 100 million times and I'll do it again. And it was a groundbreaking study where they went to modern hunter-gatherer tribe called the Hodza tribe. And they live the way that we lived, 50,000, 100,000 years ago, presumably, which is they don't have modern agriculture, they don't have technology. They hunt and they gather and they move a lot. In comparison to the average Westerner, they move a lot and yet when scientists went down and through sophisticated testing, tested their metabolic rates, what they found was these Hodza tribes people, they burned generally the same amount of calories as the average Westerner and they moved way more. And you think, well, how's that possible? Well, the kind of movement that they did wasn't like this crazy muscle building movement. It was a lot of cardio, lots of running, lots of walking. And our bodies evolved. They're very efficient at it now. It has to be. It doesn't make sense for a hunter-gatherer to burn 7,000 calories a day. You can't find 7,000 calories. Well, and if it didn't happen that way, all of our athletes would disappear. Because anybody who's ever seen a professional athlete, their training volume is unbelievable. And if just training more cardio, burning more calories was an effective method to continue to lose, then every athlete would be 60 pounds and just a bag of bones. They'd have to eat like 20,000 calories a day. Yeah, or they'd have to eat 20,000, 30,000 calories to maintain that, which is not the case at all. And under the assumption, food's always been that readily available. I feel like we have to address to the fitness dorks that glom onto the studies that talk about three pounds of muscle, metabolically, is insignificant. And so you shouldn't worry about losing it. You're gonna have, when you go in it, because this is messaging, right, in our space. You shouldn't worry about losing a couple pounds. If you gotta lose 50 pounds of fat, you need to reduce calories, you need to move more. And it doesn't matter if you lose five or six pounds of muscle along the way of losing your 20 pounds of body fat. And I don't think that's a good message at all. And I think that the studies that they attach themselves to are very, they're narrow. Yeah, very narrow in comparison to what we know is happening with the body. I mean, I can't explain to you how I was able to get somebody to have five more pounds of muscle, but yet eating 8,900 calories more a day. But I've seen it. I've seen it so many times happen before. Now, what the studies show is that, the muscle is only needing an extra six to 20 calories more a day. So mathematically, that doesn't make sense. But then you have to factor in the behavioral change that happens for that person, because they're fitter than what they were before. Also what the behavioral change around in order to maintain and keep that muscle around that. Also the behaviors around nutrition in order to maintain that muscle. It's more than that, Adam. There's a lot of unexplained. The metabolism, the million metabolism is super, super complex. It's up there with the universe. Yeah, it's like the brain is more complex. Everything else is easier to understand. We become more or less efficient with our current lean body mass. So I mean, there's studies on POWs, people who are prisoners of war, who's surviving on 300 calories a day for years and years and years. How's that possible, right? The human body has this incredible capacity to become extremely thrifty and efficient with calories or much less efficient. This is why you have people with, we all know those people, skinny guy or girl that eats that crazy, doesn't gain any weight, the person who eats way less, gains tons of body fat, how's this possible? It's obviously not one to one. It's obviously not a pound of muscle equals this, a pound of muscle equals that. But if you trend towards building and you do build, you will trend towards a less efficient metabolism, meaning burn more calories. You want less efficiency with the problems that we have in modern society. We don't want a metabolism that is super efficient like a super advanced efficient car that burns barely gas. That food can be delivered to you. Yeah, exactly. Not in a society like that. Right, right. So it's not, it's true. It's not one pound of muscle equals this, but if you send this signal to build muscle, feed it to do so, and you build a little bit, you see this trend towards a faster metabolism. There are individual variances, but I have a similar example. Adam, we have people on the show who call in all the time and ask us questions who are like, I started out eating 1200 calories. Now I'm eating 2500 calories and I'm not gaining any body fat. It's like, well, how did that happen? And they only gained like four pounds of muscle. Right. How did that happen? Their body's less efficient. It's burning more of these calories. You want to do that. You want to move in that direction. Well, one of the strongest signals you can send your body to slow its metabolism down is to eat a super low calorie and do it for a long period of time. Even with strength training, you tend to see a metabolism slow down if you do this for too long. So eating too little for too long can definitely result in a metabolism that decides or a body that adapts to become more efficient. You know, the other thing that it does and it's your third point is you're less motivated to move more because you have less energy. And this is actually hitting home for me currently right now. So I've been back on my kick now for, this is I think week three or four of really dialed in nutritionally and training. And one of the things I needed to do was I had like Justin, I was skipping breakfast. I wasn't moving very much. So I was like, you know what? I need to cut out some calories because I'm not moving very much. And so that was my way of combating the additional calories and making sure that if I'm not training a lot, I better not put on a bunch of extra body fat. One of the easiest ways, I'll skip breakfast, have my coffee or caffeine in the morning, I'm fine, don't eat till one or two o'clock. Okay, well that was fine to help mitigate not putting on an extra weight. But boy, it made it difficult to motivate myself to train at noon or one. I just felt tired after podcasting, I wasn't motivated. So if you haven't noticed, like I've been eating again, like at least a meal or two, like I've said on this podcast many times, my best workouts, the best I ever feel is when I've got a meal or two in me, then my body feels geared up and ready to use that fuel and I'm more motivated to go do it versus me being so fasted and low calorie, I just don't have the gas or the drive to wanna do that. Yeah, I remember years ago, I know you guys saw this at 24 Fitness. I wasn't there at the time, this became a big thing and I actually used it in my wellness studio. It was a device called the BodyBug. It was one of the first of its kind. Now there's lots of devices that do this, but it was groundbreaking when it first came out. One of the most accurate ones that ever came out. Yeah, so what you do is you'd wear this and with relative accuracy, compared to anything else that was out there, very accurate, would tell you how many calories you're burning. And it did this through sophisticated metrics. You would wear it, it was on your arm, it would measure things like movement, skin temperature, like there was lots of different heart rate, lots of different things it measured. And it was able to within, I think 10% error. It was 96%. Okay, so even better. So 96% accurate would tell you how many calories you're burning. And I remember I would have clients put these on and we would see their days, how many calories they were burning. And I'll never forget, because it was such, this is one of those moments as a trainer where you're like, you know, like, like, ground breaking, right? Yeah, they would, I would look at their calories and these were people that were working out every day, Monday through Friday. Okay, so Monday through Friday, they were in the gym for an hour. And they'd look at their body bug and they'd be like, what did you do Saturday and Sunday? You burned so many calories. Oh, I put dishes away. Yeah. Oh, I was doing housework all day. I went to the mall. Sweeping. I was, yeah, I washed the cars. Braking our side. And I'm like, what? I'm like, you work out at the gym Monday through Friday and then it dawned on me. Oh yeah. Monday through Friday, you work out for an hour. Then you go out to work and you sit down the rest of the day. Saturday and Sunday, I mean, it wasn't intense, but you were up and moving for like seven hours. So it dawned on me like, okay, all of this like non-specific exercise calorie burn is really important. And so eating too little, even if you force yourself to work out, what they find in studies when people cut their calories is the rest of the day, they sit more, they stand less, they walk less, they play less, they do less of anything that requires any physical movement and therefore they actually burn less calories. Eating too low of calories will affect you behaviorally without you even noticing. Everything from tapping your foot to standing up to taking extra steps. It's subtle. Yes. And I think that too, because you are going to the gym and you're gonna do your workout for the day and like that's a check box for you, for movement for that entire day. And that's like the majority of my clients was like, okay, I did my bit on Monday through Friday and like I had my hour where I just really powered it out. But they're literally sitting on their butt the entire day otherwise and it was like so revealing that on the weekends there was just being up and like moving around and running errands. And yeah, dude, it was like, it was so many, it was like hundreds, it was like almost a thousand more calories each. Well, not long after that body book came out, they actually did a study, because I used to tout this study all the time or it showed that a person who trained five to six days a week, was it five to six days or was it four to five days? It was either four to five days or five to six days a week for an hour to time and today's time was still considered sedentary, which nobody, okay, in the gym, we used to have this survey, right? That was, you'd ask like, would you- Very active. Yeah, are you active, very active, not active at all? Like everybody would put like even- Very active. Very active, very, and it's like, because if they were, oh, I go to the gym, you know, every day, you know, all three of it, okay, you go to the gym every day for one hour, but then you have an engineer job or you sit at a desk all day long, like, no, you're sedentary. Like I'm sorry, but you're one hour of activity of 400 calorie burning is not enough to make you considered, you're an active person. And think about this way, it's like, there's definitely structured exercise, but think about the days that you feel energized, that you feel good. You move more, you get out more, you play with your kids more, you do more things and eating too low of calorie does affect your behaviors to make you more sedentary even if you work out, even if you have scheduled workouts and we've seen this time and time again. The next thing is that eating too low of calorie because of the muscle loss, because you're eating too little, your hormones actually start to shift towards fat storage. All right, why is that? Eating too little is a stress on the body. It's actually probably one of the first stresses besides being hunted by predators that our bodies learn to adapt to because food is hard to come by. And your hormones can shift and move to less body fat, more body fat, more muscle, less muscle. Okay, if you don't believe me, look at the studies on men with low testosterone who then take testosterone replacement therapy. They're not taking steroids like body builders, they're just getting their testosterone levels up to high normal from where they were, which is below low, right? What do they find? They gain muscle and lose body fat, okay? You can see studies on growth hormone. Growth hormone will do the same thing. You give growth hormone to somebody who's deficient or who's older and they don't have to work out, they don't have to do anything. They end up building a little muscle, bring a little bit of body fat, even if they don't change their diet. What's going on? Hormones, hormones signal the body to do lots of different things and a couple of things that your hormones tell your body to do is build muscle or burn body fat. Well, if we eat too little for too long, your body tries to protect itself. And one of the best ways your body protects itself is to store calories. It's like you're in a recession, the economy's going to crap. What do you do? Honey, stop spending money. We need to save as much money as possible because we don't know what's gonna happen. Your body does this with calories. If it feels too much stress, and this is all stresses, but we're talking about too low of calories, it'll shift its hormones to fat storage. Preserve. To preserve, not muscle gain, but fat storage. By the way, that becomes a louder signal when you also increase the activity and intensity. Yes. So not only do you eat extremely low calories, then you go punish yourself in the gym, which tends to be the person too. Very few people I know decide they're gonna go on extreme low calorie diet and they go, oh, I'm just gonna do yoga and walk. Those same people that go extreme diet tend to also go extreme training and they do the high intensity, the endurance, the circuit training, the everyday, the 75 hard. This is those same mentality that those people, and you're not just sending even louder signal for your body to preserve. That's right. And then, okay, so this next one, I think is one of the biggest, most important ones. This is a behavioral one, which is this tends to result in a behavior where when you do eat more, you tend to binge. So let me paint the picture. You eat too little for a long period of time. You end up losing muscle, slowing the metabolism down, hormones shift to fat storage, promotion, and less muscle. So you've got this like perfect storm, and then you go off. Why? Because you've been restricting for so long, appetite's high, maybe you go on vacation, hey, this is what I can do now. So your body's primed to store body fat, you've been eating low calories for a long time, then you go binge, which almost always is the behavior that follows. Now you store a ton of body fat, and I've seen this time and time again where a client goes on vacation for two weeks and gains like seven pounds of body fat. Mathematically, you know how difficult that is to do when you do the math, and yet you see stuff like this, it's pretty wild. Well, when we were trainers, we didn't know this because I think the studies came out later, but we now know too, when you go from that hardcore restricting to hardcore binging like that, you actually increase your fat cells. The number of fat cells. Which that doesn't happen in any normal case, right? No. Typically what happens to us when we gain weight, lose weight is our fat cells grow, and then they shrink, and that's how we. Yeah, this is recent. Probably have an extreme environment. Yeah, this is recent. Lane Norton brought this up because of competitors when they extreme diet, and then they, you know, body builders and physique competitors and figure competitors post show, will just like eat like crazy, right? For like a month or two and gain like 20 pounds, 15 pounds, 30 pounds. And what they found is that they actually added fat cells to their body. And the theory is that the body, because they went so restricted, and then they went excess, it tried to adapt by increasing or improving its ability to capture calories. So it actually added fat cells, which then don't go away. Typically they don't go away. Once you add the fat cells, they don't go away. Which I saw this firsthand with all the competitors, which it was, you know, they, they had this formula of exactly what you said. They restrict hardcore for the show, after show, they gain like crazy. They're not really worried about body fat. They go again. And for some reason, every time, every show, every show, they had a harder time doing the same thing. Yeah, they're like, this is my formula. This is my body type. I have the same amount of muscle. I should be able to do X calories, X amount of cardio, X amount of training to result in that same body, but I'm not able to. And they had some term for it that they would call it. Like they were, I forget what they used to, they all call it, they'd call it fatigue and they need to reset. They'd have to stop doing shows for a while. And it's like, no, it's the way you're extreme dieting that's causing you to add fat cells, which is making it that much more difficult every time you don't cut for another show. Yeah, it's the most important thing to manage or to pay attention to whenever you're, when you're trying to be healthy, fit, long-term, lean, long-term are your behaviors because that's what's gonna stick. And if you go, you eat too little for too long and then you find yourself binging occasionally, where you, you know, it's like you just go off your diet a little bit. It's like you go way so off that you're uncomfortable, that you eat to the point where you can't breathe type of deal. Like that behavior is, it's gonna be impossible for you to maintain a good, lean, healthy, physique long-term with that. And going too hard and extreme in one direction, it tends to lead to a opposite reaction on the other end, which is this binging type behavior. Lastly, people who eat too little for too long, they are at a higher risk of nutrient deficiencies. Nutrients are what, obviously food contains nutrients. Well, if you're eating a thousand calories a day and you've been doing it for a long time, you're only getting a thousand calories with the food, with the nutrients that comes in that food. And unless you're eating like super hyper nutrient dense food, plus you're taking multivitamins, you're probably gonna result or see some nutrient deficiencies. This was very common. When I started working with practitioners who would do nutrient testing and I would get clients who were, you know, and they were typically women where they eat real, real little for long periods of time. And I'd say, hey, let's test your nutrient levels. They would do hair tests and other tests to see blood tests to see where the nutrients are at. I could almost always predict, oh, this woman eats barely anything. She's been doing it for a long time. She's skinny fat. She's been dieting for half her life. She's gonna come back with two or three nutrient deficiencies. Always, almost always they'd come back with some kind of nutrient vitamin D or zinc or some B vitamin nutrient deficiency was always. Well, I think this is super common because already I forget what the research is around this, but I believe like the average woman gains weight on like 1,500 or 1,600 calories. It's really, really low. And so I think chronically, the society as if especially females have under eight. And I think it's just because of what's been promoted to them for so long. So you take that same, you know, female client who's already only eating 1,500 to 1,800 calories and is unhappy with their weight and they want to lose say 20 or 30 pounds and then you cut and restrict that. You can't possibly get, there's not a nutrient dense enough food to get enough without- You're not going to vary it up that much either. I mean, when you're in like a calorie deficit that's like extreme a lot of times too, like the one thing you have to control is that like, I can limit and reduce the amount of options so that way I can be consistent because it's all about being consistent, you know, for that type of a mentality staying in that lean and low of a deficit. So to be able to vary the amount of food that you're bringing into your diet, which is going to produce like those micronutrients or, you know, just any macronutrients in general, like there's going to be a lot of opportunity to be deficient. Yeah, you're not, you typically don't see a thousand calorie a day diet and it's like this wide variety of different colors and fruits and vegetables and whatever. It's usually the same. It might actually, to be honest, most people eat the same thing every single day. By the way, nutrients, not just micronutrients, macronutrients, macronutrient deficiencies or close to deficiencies were quite high. You see somebody in low calories all the time. They almost always are too low a protein and oftentimes, yeah, the fats, you know? And if you're deficient, if you're deficient in something that's essential, your rate of anxieties, higher potential anxiety, depression, other mental issues and then your body is just not functioning optimally and it's going to lower its nutrient thirsty tissues, muscle, muscle requires lots of nutrients to maintain muscle and vitamins and proteins. Even healthy fats for your hormones, right? If your fats are not high enough, your hormones are going to be off and that, you know, one of the points I made about hormones shifting towards fat storage. So if you eat too low for too long, you're probably lacking something and when you lack something that you need, your body cannot operate the way it should and that makes fat loss very, very difficult. It's really hard to lose body fat when you're unhealthy or at least do it in a sustainable way. So I hope we made the case that if you eat too little, you can definitely make yourself fatter. Look, if you like the show, head over to mindpumpfree.com and check out our guides. We have guides that can help you with almost any health or fitness goal. You can also find all of us on Instagram. So Justin is on Instagram at Mind Pump. Justin, you can find me on Instagram at Mind Pump to Stefano and you can find Adam on Instagram at Mind Pump Adam. Today, we're going to teach you everything you need to know to build a strong, well-developed chest. When I think of weak points and areas that I struggled with developing for a really long time, chest was up there with the work. Yeah, it was for me. It was for me for sure. I got more caught up in the weight I could lift versus how I was developing my body. I think it's one of the most challenging muscles to develop for most people because the form and technique.