 First question is from Ryan Estep. What are some signals you can hone in on to know when you could benefit from calorie increase or decrease? Been around maintenance for a while and recently seen some slight puffiness. Have I adapted to that amount and need to slowly increase or is it a good time to go down? Yeah, well, first of all, the comment slight puffiness, that can mean a lot of different things. It could be water retention, lack of sleep can cause puffiness also. Also, when people say I'm at maintenance for a long time, are you really at maintenance or are you winging it and feeling like you're at maintenance because when people are not literally counting and measuring and weighing, they're almost always off. So that's number one. Now, as far as signals that can tell you when you can increase or decrease, here's what I tend to pay attention to for myself and I would also, I used to coach my clients this way. When it was time to decrease, let's say you're in a bulk, you're eating more calories and you're burning. When it becomes a chore to eat, when you find your appetite start to decrease and it's like, I can't eat this much anymore, probably time to start to decrease calories. On the flip side, when your calories are low and your appetite's high and it's high and it continues to go higher and higher and then you start to notice that your strength gains start to really drop in the gym, performance starts to drop, maybe it's time to bump them. Here's a good rule of thumb. I would say regardless of what your goals are, at least every two or three weeks, throw in a day or two that's different. No matter what, you can go back to what you were doing before and studies actually show this, by the way. There's a great study that was done not the long ago where they compared people who were on a consistent calorie deficit versus people who were on a calorie deficit and then would throw in some higher calorie days and the people who threw in the higher calorie days burned more body fat and kept more muscle. So it's a better strategy to do it that way. I feel like whenever the results either direction slow up. For example, like when I'm bulking and weight's coming on the scale, even if I'm feeling a little puffy, if I feel like the gains, I like the way I'm looking week over week over week, I'm gonna keep going. If I feel like I don't feel like I'm liking the way I'm looking anymore, strength is starting to plateau, I'm in this surplus, that's when I'll start to come back the other direction. And the same thing is true when I'm gonna cut. If I'm gonna cut and week over week, I'm seeing improvement in my physique and I like the way it's looking, I'm gonna keep riding it. The minute that I start to see that slow down and I'm not noticing major progress week over week, I go the opposite direction. So, and I think that that number is gonna look different for every person and for me, that's what I've found works the best. Yeah, you know what's hard about this is it's hard to remain objective because most people lean to either, this is pretty general, but generally speaking, I could put people into two categories. People who are more focused on gaining size and strength and that's what they think about mostly and then people who just wanna be lean or lose weight and that's what they think about mostly. Here's why it's difficult to remain objective. If you're somebody that's always struggled with weight and you've been in this deficit for a long time, you may ignore the signals because you're afraid. You're afraid to increase your calories. I don't wanna gain a single pound or people on the other side, I was one of those people that I always wanted to gain weight. I always wanted to put on size. You don't wanna lose any weight. Yeah, so I don't care about these signals. It's like I don't wanna lose a single pound on the scale. So it's really hard to stay objective, which is why until you become super self aware, you've been doing this for a long time and you've got some of those insecurities out of the way, I would say every two or three weeks, no matter what, just put it in your schedule and do it no matter what because whenever you ask somebody to be objective, hey, do you think you should start to cut calories? Do you tell that to the skinny kid? No, I'm gonna keep them high. I think the signs are still good, even though they're maybe not. Yeah.