 Question is from Konichiwa. What is the difference between reverse dieting and bulking? How long can you stay in a calorie surplus before you get efficient with calories and to add on body fat? All right, so I'll hold off the second part of this question and just answer the first one first, which is the difference between reverse dieting and bulking. The difference is the goal, okay? So both of them, you are working with a calorie surplus, but really with the reverse diet, what you're trying to do is you're trying to back out of a low calorie diet situation and you're trying to back out gracefully. You're trying to do it in a way to where you don't have this crash weight gain that can happen from an extreme diet. So you see reverse dieting used most often with like physique competitors, bodybuilders, bikini competitors who will get really, really, really shredded for an event. And that usually means that they're towards the end of their cut or whatever. Their calories are as low as they're gonna get, oftentimes very low. Their activity is through the roof, they're doing lots of cardio, lots of working out. So to paint the scenario, let's say this female goes into a contest eating 1,200 calories a day or maybe even a little less. She's doing an hour of cardio every day plus working out. She does the contest, she does really well. What you don't wanna do is go, boom, I'm off the diet, I'm gonna eat whatever I want and I'm gonna just not do as much cardio because that will cause really rapid weight gain, may actually add fat cells to your body, isn't very healthy. So reverse dieting is rather than just going out of that is to slowly increase your calories and slowly reduce your cardiovascular activity. It's a healthy way of coming out of that type of a situation. The other example that too would actually be the client who comes to me and he or she is 300 pounds, they have yo-yo dieted their whole life and I have them track their food like I do everybody when we first start and just eat what you normally eat and then they provide their diet to me and they're eating 1,100 calories and they're 300 pounds and that is another example of where we would take a reverse diet type of an approach where we are slowly trying to add calories back in the diet and get their body used to that without putting on any excess body fat, which is similar to bulking. I think it's really how quote unquote bulking should be done. I mean, bulking is kind of an old term that we've used for a long time for increasing calories and what's happened is that we've turned it in what most people turn it into is what they call like a dirty bulk where it's okay, I'm trying to gain weight right now so I can't have this as out the window, it doesn't exist anymore, I can have whatever I want, right? I can eat whatever calories I want because I'm trying to put size on but we recommend against that, right? I think that creates a bad relationship with food. I think most people that you see that bulk like this put on as much or more body fat than they actually do muscle and then when they decide to lean back down they just go right back to the same starting point or worse than they were in before. So I think it's the old way of putting mass and size on that I think is slowly dying, to be honest with you. Yeah, yeah, you wanna increase your calories if you're trying to build muscle, you don't need to increase them as much as you think and then just monitor, monitor how you're doing. Now the second part about, how long can you stay in a calorie surplus before your body starts to add body fat? Well that's very different from person to person. The only way to know when it's time to stop is to monitor. Monitor yourself, slowly add. With some people I would add 50 to 100 calories per day per week, so this week we went from 1200 calories to 1300 calories and we'll watch the scale, watch the body fat calipers, how do you feel? Okay, everything looks good, let's add a little bit more. You wanna kind of come to terms with the fact that you will gain some weight, that's okay. Especially if you're coming out of a very, very low calorie situation. The idea though is for that weight to be muscle, so hopefully body fat percentage doesn't go up too much. And you keep doing that approach until you start to notice diminishing gains, until you start to notice, I'm gaining more body fat than I am muscle, then you can get back out of that. Sometimes doing a shortcut will get your body right in the right state to go back to the higher calorie. And this is a hard thing I think for people to grasp, even somebody who's been training for a long time. I don't know if I told you guys this or I think I told you Sal that I was helping our good friend, Larry's ex-wife right now get in shape. And she's somebody who's very familiar to the weight room and training and has kept herself in pretty good shape most of her life. And even where our starting point is she's not like way out of shape or anything. But I'm trying to get her to approach it differently as she's training right now. And one of the things that we're talking about is, I want to get her calories up. For somebody who is as active, she steps more than 10,000 steps a day. She's got a decent amount of lean body mass. She's an active fit person as it is. But she was only eating like 1,400, 1,500 calories when I first kind of assessed her diet and also doing cardio. So I've eliminated all cardio completely and we've been, you know, she's running MAPS anabolic right now and I've got her slowly increasing her calories. And every time we communicate, I'm always constantly saying, okay, this is, you're doing great here, you're doing great there. Add more here, a little bit more of this. No cardio, no cardio. And she asked me there today, like, when are we gonna be able to do cardio? And I said, well, before we even introduce cardio or even think about restricting calories, my goal is to get you up to, you know, in 2000 plus, mid 2000s is where I'd like to be calorie wise before I come the other way. And I go, right now we're in a really good place. We've eliminated cardio. You are stepping the same as you were before. We are now up to 1800 to 2000 calories a day and her weight's like holding. So what I, and I see her food that she's making good choices. She's getting protein intake. She's getting adequate fiber. Diet looks really good. And we're increasing calories. We're doing no cardio. And yet her weight is holding the same. Now, what I know is that that's a real mental fuck for most people because we wanna see, if I'm on the bulk, I wanna see scale going up like crazy. If I'm on the cut, I wanna see scale going down. But really, if there's good programming, if you're training correctly and you're eating well, balanced and you're hitting your macro targets and you want, and you're being able to increase calories and the scale is staying the same. I know good things are happening. I know she's getting stronger. That's the response that I'm getting from her or dead lifters going up or squad is going up, but the scale is not going up but their calories are going up. So I know that there's probably a beautiful exchange happening right now. We're probably losing a pound to a pound and a half of body fat. We're gaining somewhere between a half a pound to a pound of muscle. And the rest is probably water going in and out. So we have a beautiful place to be, but it's such a hard place for people to be comfortable and okay with because we always wanna see these quick results. And that's what I find myself coaching the most to is like, listen, if you're eating well and by well hitting your macro targets, your protein intake like you're supposed to to making good food, whole food choices. And you're following like a maps program and your scale is staying the same. You're in a really good place. Oh, it's amazing. You're in an amazing place. That's amazing. And we forget the mental component too. One of the main reasons, in my opinion, the slow approach is better is the way you adapt to it mentally. Going from diet to bulk in extreme ways is a fantastic way to get you to binge, develop bad relationship with food. Very rarely do, are we able to change our behaviors in such radical ways and do it in a healthy way? It's typically a slow kind of step approach, getting yourself used to things. So the slow approach also works mentally as well.