 Our first caller is Adam from Wisconsin. Hey, what's up, Adam? How can we help you? Hey, guys, thanks for having me on. So I've been lifting for years now, probably since my teen years, really, seriously, and currently on a strength building program, lifting six or so days a week. Three of those days are the major lifts, bench, squat, and deadlift, and then three of the other days are dedicated to cardio and accessory work. I move a lot around at my job. I'm on my feet quite a bit, and so I probably get 20,000 or so steps a day. Several years ago, I was eating pretty low calorie and had been reversing back up just slowly. And with some weight gain, so right now I'm weighing around 240 pounds, I'm in my late 30s. And I'm reversed back up to 2,500 calories a day. I've been diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and my doctor, and I've seen a couple of different doctors and got second opinions, they all say my labs are within normal range. And I'm kind of worried that cutting from this current caloric level will be challenging given the context and worried about kind of upping calories without increasing activity will increase weight gain. And again, I've just seen a couple different specialists just kind of running into a wall and don't want to go out and seek a guru, another guru to answer questions. So I just thought I'd reach out to you all and see what you had in mind. Okay, so it sounds like a bit of a challenging situation. Your body weights at 240, 38. So you're a big dude. How tall are you? I'm 6'5". Yeah, it's okay. So you're a pretty big dude. 2,500 calories a day with that much activity, and that's too much size. It's really low. You have three options here if you want to lose weight. One is to move more. Second is to eat less. Third is to speed up your metabolism. That's the third option. I would go with the third option. You're already moving so much, you're working out six days a week. I don't think moving more is a good idea. I don't think eating less is a good idea either for a guy your size. That's not very many calories. Now the key with speeding up your metabolism, you have to focus on muscle gain. And with the level of activity that you're doing, you're probably doing too much weight. That's what I think. Six days a week of resistance training, even though you're doing auxiliary work on the off days is just probably too much. I would bring it down to three days a week, full body resistance training, and you're doing 20,000 steps a day naturally anyway. In other words, it's part of your job. I don't see any benefit to doing additional cardio unless you want to improve your endurance and stamina. I don't think that's necessarily a good idea. So I would slowly scale back on the cardio, reduce the resistance training, just focus on three days a week, just try to get stronger. And once everything starts to feel good, you see the strength go up, appetite goes up, then you can start to slowly bump your calories again. But I would not want to cut your calories at what you're at now. And I definitely wouldn't want to increase your activity. Hell no. You want your size, 2,500 calories should be your cut. I'd want to get you to a place where you're... Over 3,000? Oh, yeah. 2,400. We say 6,500. You're not a little guy at all. And that's a low amount of calories to be eating already. And what my thing is, if he's doing 20,000 steps, six days a week weight training plus cardio on top of that, his body is just going and only eating 2,500 calories. It's saying we have to conserve every bit of calories you give it because it doesn't think you're going to give it any more food. So I would completely scale back on the cardio, get rid of it all the way. And on the weight training, it would go to an anabolic. So I'd go MAPS anabolic is what I would run three days a week full body routine. Now, the challenging part is going to be the mental piece. You completely go from six days a week activity, doing cardio, and then you start to slowly, you're not going to need to increase calories that much at first because the reduced amount of activity hopefully will start to add and build muscle. And I would allow my appetite to dictate kind of how I start to do that. If you do a good job of just scaling back on all this, giving your body recovery, focus on building strength, hopefully in a couple of weeks, you right away start to feel the appetite increase and allow that to be the signal that says, okay, let's give myself a couple hundred more calories, and then start to slowly bump the calories over time. And then our long term goal, if you were a client of mine, I would say, hey, let's, let's really try and see if we can get you to 3500 calories and kind of keep your weight about the same, give or take five pounds or so and try and slowly get you up there. And then when we're at 35, if you say, Hey, I want to lean out, then we can go the other direction. Another challenge though, recommending anabolic, those trigger session days, we got to keep those really low intensity. And I know like just having the, that's scheduled in is another day of like, technically it's a workout, but it's really something to, you know, restore and recover. And so if you use it as a way to just stimulate the muscle and get a nice pump, but, but don't go, don't overdo it, don't go overboard with it. Now, you also at the very end, you wrote in here, you didn't say anything, but you wrote on the question I see, you wrote TRT and question mark. I definitely would do the advice we're giving first, but I also would recommend joining the free week. We opened up the forum for free for everybody. And Dr. Ran and his team at the regenerative sport medicine, they're going to start coming in and speaking twice a month free and basically doing free live Q&As in there twice a month starting in December. So you can have access to that. It's absolutely free. So if you have questions around hormones, thyroid stuff like that, he would be a great person to the forum is called mine pump hormones on Facebook. So it's open for free right now. You know, a hormone panel, which I'm sure you probably did if you're hyperthyroid. So I'm assuming they already tested testosterone. They did. Yeah. Do you know what you're, if you do mind me at masking asking what levels you were at? Oh, that's a great question. I don't have it right off the top of my head. The endocrinologist has said it was within the normal range, but it was on the low end of the normal range is 300 to 1100. So, you know, who knows, but it's good that you have a baseline. So you could test it again and see where it's at. And you know, I would, like Adam said, I would leave that for last because testosterone levels can get, you know, you could lower or raise your testosterone by 30, 40, 50. I've seen people raise or lower it by 50% through lifestyle. You won't double it, but 50% increase. I've seen before. Usually it's around 20, 30% with lifestyle changes. So, you know, I would take a look at that. Do you have access to MAPS Antibolic, by the way? I do not know. Okay. Follow that program. That's going to be the program for you. Follow MAPS Antibolic. That's the perfect program for what you're looking to do. And then allow your body to adapt. Give it a chance to adapt. A guy your size, if you get your body wanting to build muscle, you're going to be blown away by how much faster your metabolism gets. It's a pretty remarkable change when you get it moving in that direction. Cool. You guys are so awesome. I really appreciate it. That was where my brain was going, but it's nice to have that external validation because it's just a, it's the mental game, right? 100%. Yeah, it totally is. And it's counter to the, you know, the mainstream health advice. Like you said, you talk to your doctor who knows very little about exercise and nutrition. And they're just going to tell you, oh, you know, you probably should eat less or move more. Because yeah, that's not really their level of expertise. And yeah, moving more and eating less would definitely get you to lose weight. But boy, would that put you in a tough position at your size. You know, you don't want to be sitting around 1900 calories maintenance. Yeah, for a six big ass dude. Yeah, that's real tough, dude. So eating less than your girlfriend is. That's like, yeah, that's tough. So yeah, no, we've, we've current I've had that conversation. So yeah, cool. All right. So follow maps and a ball and, and give it a shot. Let us know what happens. Thanks, Adam. Thank you. Thanks y'all so much. Thank you. Have a good rest of your day, huh? Thanks, brother. You know, the, the fact that he's 38 was already thinking that like I have hope. I, when I hear this, and we get a question like this, right away, I always go back to like my mindset at 25. And I always, I always wonder like when we get someone like this, I always question like if I was 25 and heard the advice from you guys telling me to do that, would I listen to it? Or I'd just be like, yeah, whatever about it. Because the truth is it's so hard to get when you're doing this much work. He's especially because you're, you're hearing counter crappy information from other influencers and stuff like that. Yeah. And you're, you're motivated. You're motivated to change. And you're, you're busting your ass six days a week, you know, moving, lifting, doing all the stuff. He's, he's obviously getting after it and, but only eating 2,500 calories. It's like, it's a very frustrating place to be. Yeah. The most, in my opinion, illuminating study that confirms what we've all experienced with our clients, what confirms our anecdotes, our hundreds of anecdotes was a very well done study on the, the Northern Tanzania tribe, the Hadza tribe who lives like modern, they live like hunter-gatherers. They don't have electricity. They move all the time. They run down their prey when they hunt it, like extremely active compared to the average person. And when they tested these people, their metabolisms were remarkably similar to the average Western couch potato. So that right there just proves how much your metabolism will adapt to a certain types of activity. And what he's doing is he's telling his body to be efficient with calories. Obviously a guy 240 pounds at six, five, you know, I, I personally, who at 200 pounds is I can maintain and be shredded at 2,500 calories a day. He's 240, six, five. Well, that's what I cut for. That was my cut for a show. So I was, I mean, that's, that's your lowest, lowest. Yeah. Yeah. So I, and I would bulk up. So his size, right, 240, we're not that far off, right? He's six, he's six, five. I was, I'm six, three, and I'd get up to about 240 pounds, but I would be eating almost 5,000 calories. And then I'd go down to four, and then I'd go down to 3,500 and then three, and then literally heading into peak week, like the lowest of lowest calories I'd be at would be 2,500. And that's, I mean, for me, that would have been like starving my body for like a week or two. So if that's where he's at currently right now, you do not want to have to try and cut from there. He's going to be miserable, even if he did see a few pounds come off. Yeah. 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.