 Our next caller is Tina from Texas. Hey, Tina, how can we help you? Hey, how are you doing? Good. All right, so I have two questions. My first one is about calorie surplus, and my second one is about IF. So as far as the calorie surplus goes, real quick, background, I'm 51. About two years ago, I started getting some menopausal symptoms. Everything I was doing before wasn't working anymore. So I dove in, started to research, and I was able to recomp pretty good after a year and a half by following macros and lifting more consistently. And so I wanted to step it up, and I hired an online coach in December because my goal was just a little bit more muscle definition. And she put me on a six-day split, three-leg days, which was great. I'm loving it. That's what I'm doing right now. And she put me on a meal plan that's like six meals a day, typical, you know, grilled chicken, rice. I was able to follow it. I lost some body fat, but I'm still feeling like I'm not getting the muscle definition I want. And I'm wondering if it's because I'm not eating enough. That's what I've read. You've got to be in a calorie surplus to gain muscle. And then as far as the IF goes, I've always really liked IF. I like the way it makes me feel. I like the health benefits of it. But I've read that if you don't break your fast within a certain amount of time after your workout, that you could risk muscle loss. Let's stick to the first one first. Let's get the first one first. And let me add, Tina, I have a question for you. Did you ask if your personal trainer listens to Mind Pump first? No, I did not. Oh, Tina. Tina. Damn it, Tina. I tell everybody. If you're going to hire a trainer, that should be the first question you guys ask right now. So that would be the second question I have for you. Where are the calories at right now? So I started in December when she gave me the plan. She didn't give me calories. She just gave me ounces and follow this plan. When I calculated it, it was like 1,200 calories. And I asked her, I'm like, is this right? And she said, well, yeah, they're going to vary a little. I do have one high carb day. So they were like around 1,200, 1,300. But I listened to my body. And if I'm working out and I get hungry, I will eat. I'll make sure I make some good choices. But so I wasn't following her plan 100%. I was listening more to my body. Good for you. And that's better because a six day split. And I don't know how tall and how heavy you are. But that's not very many calories, especially somebody who's training that aggressively. So that would be the first thing. You're correct in the idea. If we're going to try and build muscle, unless you were a total newbie, you will see some newbie gains of building muscle when you're on low calorie. But for the most part, in order to build muscle, build that metabolism up, we're going to want to increase calories. And so I would actually push you more in the direction of like a maps anabolic type of program, which is only a three day a week full body routine, and increase your calories to help build some muscle, speed the metabolism up before I take you back the other direction. Yeah, your calories are a little low. And because you've been cutting for a little while and your age, even you talked about your age a little bit, I would exactly what Adam said, bump your calories up and try to gain strength and gain muscle. And what you might find is you'll actually get leaner as a result. You might find that you'll gain muscle and lose body fat at the same time. At 1,200 calories, you have nowhere else to go, right? If you stay at 1,200 calories and you're not as lean as you want to be, the only way you can, I guess, the only direction you can go is by dropping your calories even more. And that's just not sustainable, at least not with the clients I've ever worked with. It's too low. So bump the calories up and I would go for strength. I would go for increasing strength and you're likely to find that you're going to get leaner as a result. At the very least, you'll maintain your leanness, gain some muscle and speed up your metabolism, which case it's going to make the future cut much easier. As far as intermittent fasting is concerned, no, that's false. You're not going to lose muscle if you don't eat food for a day or whatever, 12 hours. That doesn't work that way. However, too frequent intermittent fasting in people can sometimes be a stress on the body. And this is more common with women and more common with women past the age of 40. You start to see hormone imbalances pop up a little bit more often in women than in men by utilizing things like intermittent fasting. Now, the reason why you feel so good doing it, there's a couple of reasons. One is it boosts catecholamine production. This is like your epinephrine and these kind of feel-good energy hormones. Cortisol goes up a little bit, which feels good. And it gives you energy. But over time, this can be a little bit of a stress. So I would limit fasting to once a week or something like that at the most, just if you like the way that it feels. Otherwise, I wouldn't worry too much about it. Doug, what was the name of the episode? Did we do an episode titled Intermittent Fastings Making You Fat or something like that? That sounds familiar. I'll look it up. Yeah, maybe you can look it up while we're talking to her so we can give that to her. If not, if I don't get it to you by the time we hang up, I'll definitely give it in this podcast. So make sure, Tina, if you haven't listened to that episode, we did a really good full-in-depth dive on the pros and cons of intermittent fasting, how we think most people should use it, how most people use it wrong. I think that episode will probably answer all the questions that you have around that. And then we're going to shoot you over maps in a block. I'm assuming you don't have it. Do you not have maps in a block? No. OK, we're going to shoot that over to you for a while. I've been looking at your program. Yep. I really want to get into one of your programs. The only thing is I just want to make sure I can do them at home with my weights. I have dumbbells up to 50 pounds. We have. We have. So I want to make sure that I'm able to do all of them. We actually have. We last year, when the whole COVID thing happened, we actually made mods for most all of our program. About 90% of them have at-home mods that all you need is a set of dumbbells and you're fine. So they all come with a mod. So we're going to send you anabolic for free. So you can follow that. Slowly increase your calories. Don't increase them a ton. And actually the way you're doing it probably right now is probably perfect. If you're hungry, feed yourself. Just make a good choice. And then the other thing that I'm going to offer to you for free is to come in our forum. So we have a private forum. Where you can come in there. And besides the three of us are in there. We've got tons of nutritionists. We've got other personal trainers in there. Mobility specialists, a lot of brilliant minds and a lot of great people going through our programs. And you've got questions about your diet. You've got questions about your training program. What's going on? You put them in there and you'll get that same type of feel that you're probably paying for with a online coach. Only you get it for free once you're inside the forum. All right, cool. Sounds good. All right, great. Thanks for calling. All right, thanks, guys. Have a good day. You too, Tina. Yeah, that old online coach approach of eat this food. Yeah, just eat this food. Cringeworthy. Follow this meal plan. They didn't even tell her the calories. Here's your workout six days a week. And by the way, OK, you put anybody on a grilled chicken rice, 1,200 calories, six meal a day. Six days a week lift. Yeah, and six days body part split lift. You're going to lose weight and lean out a little bit, for sure. So the initial results that you see is not a reflection of good coaching or good training. It's like this person obviously should have focused first on building strength and increasing calories, build her metabolism up before she went into a, especially a 1,200 calorie. I mean, and again, we didn't ask how much she weighs. I'm assuming she's more than 98 pounds, though. So I mean, that's definitely super low calorie. And I wouldn't be training her six days a week on a split. A full body, two to three day a week program would serve her much better.