 You can eat less calories and build more muscle. Our first caller is Vanessa from Illinois. Hey, what's up, Vanessa? How can we help you? Hi. First of all, I wanted to say hello to everybody, and thank you for having me on. I love your podcast. Thank you. Hello. Hello. My question is, but first, before I want to give some context, I'm 27 years old. I'm a female. I'm five foot one, and I weigh about 112 pounds. I've been working out consistently for years, and I've tried it all, but I really love strength training the most. Not until last year did I really learn about nutrition and how to calculate my macros to reach my goals. This helped me lose those stubborn pounds dramatically, and I actually went from a consistent 118 pounds to a consistent 112, 111. And I really feel like I look and I feel stronger and leaner. So I started out by finding my maintenance, which was about 1,800 calories, and then went into a deficit to 1,500 calories, which resulted in that weight loss. And from this past August until about the end of October, early November, I have been at a maintenance of 1,800. But now I really want to focus on adding more muscle. So I've been slowly creeping into a surplus since the beginning of November. So about every week I add about 50 or so calories. So I'm currently close to 2,100 calories, and I have been feeling so stuffed from this. So I really want to add muscle, and I know that the only way by listening to your podcast is to be in that surplus. But my question is, is it really good to eat that much if I'm feeling stuffed just to hit my macros and my calories? Or should I just eat until I'm satisfied and not hit them? Yeah, that's a good question. Great question, Vanessa. Okay, so you're feeling stronger, you got leaner. You're not feeling very good by trying to force food into your mouth. What do you think my answer is going to be? Don't force it. Yeah, that's 100%. This is a really good topic because I, or at least for me, I think my advice has changed over years with somebody like this. Totally. I think in the past, I would have probably told you like, hey, if you want to build that muscle, you want to grow, we got to do this. You get over it and just eat more. Yeah, and get over it. We got to keep pushing. We got to keep pushing. Where now I probably would make you reflect a little bit more on your goals and probably have a little more compassion on where you probably already are and how good you're already doing. And also, one day of missing calorie goals is not going to set us back at all. So I like this question because I know that my advice has changed in the years. Yeah, you're doing, actually, and I want to say this, you're doing phenomenal. I mean, you're really doing phenomenal to be in this place. This is the place. This is a good place to be because maintaining a lean body for you now is going to be relatively easy in the sense that you're not starving. That's really hard, right? When you're really hungry and you're like, oh my gosh, I can't eat anymore because I'm so hungry. But if I do, I'm going to, you're in the opposite position. We're like, ooh, I can't eat anymore, but I want to gain more muscle. So here's my advice. My advice is going to be to manage that feeling so that you can put yourself in a position to gain more muscle because you want to gain more muscle. So there's a couple things I want you to focus on. One is I want you to identify the foods that make you feel the most stuffed, the ones that are the hardest to eat, the most challenging to eat, maybe identify foods that might cause a little bit of blow or digestive issues. Start replacing those foods with foods that are really easy to digest and foods that make you feel like you want to eat more. So choose foods that might be a little bit more palatable, easier to digest. That'll help. And then here's the second part. You've been doing this since early November. You're already about a month and a half or so into this kind of climbing the calories up and surplus deal. I think you should throw in maybe a week of maintenance or slight deficit. I love that idea or even just a two-day low calorie. If you're feeling like you're having to stuff and you're having a hard time hitting the 2000 plus calories, nothing says you can't have two days in a row of, hey, I'm going to run two 1500 calorie days and then watch what happens on day three, how you feel. Totally. And interrupting that bulk. And this is why we promote the mini cuts and mini bulks where you don't really run in a calorie surplus longer than two to four weeks total before you go back the other direction. And you can either interrupt it with a week-long cut like Sal's saying or even just a two-day in a row of low calorie and watch how you feel by day three. You're going to probably want to eat those 2000 plus calories. Yeah. One more thing, Vanessa. One of the best signs of an effective strength training workout. Now it's not, this isn't foolproof, but it is a great sign typically is that somebody's appetite will increase. So that, that oftentimes, that oftentimes, and that always, of course, because appetite can be connected to so many different things, including cravings and emotions, but oftentimes having a general increase in appetite means your body's trying to fuel some muscle growth, right? So my next question is going to be what kind of, what kind of workout are you doing? Cause your workout might not be sending the most effective muscle building signal or maybe you need to change the workout. Are you following a maps program? Like what does your workout look like? I'm not following maps. Um, I'm actually, have you ever heard of Sydney Cummings? Yeah, I do. On YouTube? Yeah. I know. Yeah. So I'm following her and she's like really helped me learn about nutrition and like proper form, which is, so I've been with her for about a year sticking to her workouts and doing those about like five to six days a week. What do those look like? Okay, we're in a, we're in a ball. Can we're doing five to six days of working out? We have, we have some stuff we could change. Yeah. Break that down for the audience. Sure. So Sydney Cummings, she posts workouts on YouTube every day and the workouts range from 30 to 60 minutes. She'll do a lot of strength training, but when she does, she times them. So for example, you'll do one move for 45 seconds at a time. And now this is because she has to like do it for a whole audience. So it's not like me really sitting there focusing on myself and how many reps I could do. I'm just kind of doing like, for example, deadlifts for 45 seconds at a time. And she kind of keeps you going right now. She has a program in the month of December where it's a combination of strength training and now she's including some more cardio. So for example, today I did 45 minute glutein legs and ramp. So it was four minutes at a time, two different exercises. So for example, we did the first round was goblet squat for 10 reps, and then deadlift for 10 reps. You don't even have to go any further and we're going to be able to help you out. If our goal is to build muscle right now and you're also struggling to eat more calories, there's such an easy fix right here by changing your programming. Look, not trying to hate anybody. Okay. I'm familiar with these workouts. And for what the goals are that you have, actually for what most people's goals are, and again, not trying to hate anybody, but these workouts suck. They're not programmed well. It's basically a body part specific hammer your body, follow me along. You'll get sore type of workout. I don't even want to say suck with you, Sal, because here's the thing, it's probably helped you out this far to get to where you're at and you've done well. So I don't... It really has. So yeah, so let's not say it's suck. Let's just say there's something way better for you right now. Now we can perfectly transition you over to something that's very much more strength focused and we'll provide that muscle building signal, which will complement what you're doing nutritionally. So I'm really glad Sal brought that up because it is... This is the other big component to you trying to now move more towards building muscle. Watch what happens when you follow MAP Center Bollock. We're going to send that over to you for free. MAP Center Bollock will blow your mind because you've been working out for about a year. I want you to do three foundational workouts a week because there's the option to do two or three. So I want you to do three. And then on the other days, I want you to do three trigger sessions a day. Each one lasts about eight to ten minutes. You don't have to do those on the weekend. So it's just Tuesday and Thursday essentially. So Monday, Wednesday, Friday would be the foundational workouts. Tuesday, Thursday, trigger sessions. If you want, you could do trigger sessions on Saturday and Sunday as well, but it will blow your mind. For what your goals are, you just wait. Do it for three weeks and you're going to be like, holy cow, this is completely different. Also, watch what happens to your appetite because you're going to send a much louder muscle building signal by following a program like this and your appetite will naturally start to reflect that. And you'll just be able to easily eat the higher calorie. Watch what happens. So you're actually in a beautiful position. You've gotten great results following a routine like this that I think is inferior to what you're trying to do. You've got great results from it. You've built a great physique. You want the next level. You want to continue building muscle. MAPS anabolic is a much better protocol for what you're trying to do. Simply follow that and then watch what happens. I'm excited for you, Vanessa. I'm so excited. Wow. This has helped me so much. I just like it changed my perspective on a lot of things, which is what I was looking for. So I really, really appreciate all this help. Yeah. Perfect. We'll send that over to you. And then you know what else I want to do is I want you in our forum because I'm really interested to see how you feel about how your body starts to change and how you can't wait to report on it. Yeah. Yeah. And selfishly, I'd love to share. I'd like to share your progress with the rest of the forum because I know what's going to happen. If you've already feeling the way you are now, just wait till you follow like really well programmed resistance training. It's going to be night and day for you. So we'll send that to you and we're going to send you free access to the forum. I'd love for you to post in there, introduce yourself, tag the, you know, the three of us, and then let us know how everything's working. Absolutely. Wow. Thank you so much. No problem, Vanessa. Thanks for calling out. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Thank you. Oh my God. So glad you asked that question. Yeah. You know, my, we were all, we were all hovering around just the nutrition portion of this. She's doing well nutritionally. I mean, her whole strategy, it was like, you know, you don't get that a lot. So that was like, wow, you know, that's, that's great to hear. You know, I'll tell you what, selfishly as a trainer and even now some of my favorite people to help. And again, this is selfish is when I see somebody who's progressing in spite of the fact that they're doing a program that isn't very good. And I say, Oh my gosh, yeah, if you're making progress now, yeah, I can't even imagine what's going to happen when we actually put good programming. And these are the people that tend to blow, they tend to blow the bell curve out, right? You start to see like crazy acceleration of progress is going to be huge, but they're also some of the hardest people to reach because they've had success in spite of what they were doing. Yes. But luckily she called, right? That's why I wanted to point out the like, okay, I don't want to say suck because if you say that to somebody who you, who arguably might be in the best shape of their life, you'll turn them off and they'll be like, well, I got all this results. Right. And I don't know this. I don't know this girl personally, right? So the YouTube star that she's following who may have gave unlocked some things for her that completely open new doors and changed her life. And who are we? Let's say she just found mind pump and she's only listened to two or three episodes of ours, but she's followed this girl's journey for the last two years who's completely helped her us telling her that that that program sucks may turn her off to to continuing on with what we want her to do, which is a superior program, guaranteed. Doug pulled up what she's been following and for someone who's trying to build muscle, it is literally the opposite of what I would want her training like. She would not be training five to six days a week in AMRAP circuit based, no rest periods, 45 minutes straight of doing. Absolutely. It's the opposite of what she should be doing. And if she just tweaks that, watch what happens with her appetite in her diet. It'll all fall right into place. By the way, you know, this, this Doug was like this. Doug was a client that came to me and was fit following YouTube stars. Back in my day, I knew it. I knew you were doing those booty pump classes on YouTube. I have a nice butt dog, right? He was slinging them VHS tapes. Yeah, we gotta post the picture. No, but he came and he was fit and doing okay in spite of the bad workouts. The second he followed good programming, he went from thinking he was a hardgainer to hitting numbers and strength gains and muscle gains that, you know, he realized like, Oh wow, I got some real genetic potential here. So I think that's what's going to happen to Vanessa. Totally. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, you can find the full episode here or you can find other clips over here and be sure to subscribe.