 Question is from Moe Daywood, how does sleep affect fat loss? Can inadequate sleep hinder fat loss even if macros are correct? Fuck yeah, cortisol. Definitely. Yeah. So, so, um, so here's the main ways that lack of sleep affects fat loss. The main way it affects, uh, fat losses, it changes your eating patterns and behaviors and your activity levels. Okay. Cause you're obviously tired, uh, your body perceives it as stress. So, you know, the way we evolved was if you didn't have good sleep, your body's perceiving that as you need to be alert and awake. Like why would you in nature be up, you know, most of the night or not sleeping? Probably because you're not in a safe environment. So your body's perceiving a stress. Now stressed out body wants to a store more body fat because that's an insurance more often than not. The stress that we were under was either predators or lack of food. So I want more. So what it's going to do is going to make you eat more food as a result. So they've done this in studies and shown that people's appetites tend to increase. It also tends to make you crave foods that give you more of a psychological wellbeing, like feeling of wellbeing, like this temporary feel good effect. And this is anytime you feel like shit. Um, the second thing is your body will lose muscle. Um, in a stressed out, uh, situation, your muscle starts to deteriorate because muscle is expensive. It's expensive tissue. Um, and your body's trying to become it's a luxury. More efficient. Um, so lack of activity or, or ultra activity patterns, more food and take or worse food intake, that's the main way it makes you gain body fat. But the second part of the question was, what if the macros are good? Can it still hinder fat loss? Yes. Um, I definitely think so. I think there's this, your body can lose weight and gain weight in different ways, not always going to be body fat. So what may end up happening is you may end up weighing the same, but you're less muscle and more body fat. So overall weight stays the same, but your, your body composition. What about how, how, how cortisol is affected and your thyroid and things like that, that can be affected. That's what that's, that's what I'm referring to. So let's say your calories are the same, but your cortisol is totally impacted the way you store body fat is going to change. And the, and you may store more body fat and lose muscle. Um, I mean calories in versus calories out starts to still obeyed, but you know, and here's the other part, Adam, you're absolutely right. Can hormonal changes alter how many calories your body burns at rest. Absolutely. Oh yeah. You give a man testosterone, uh, don't change his activity levels and he'll just naturally get a little leaner and build more muscle just from the changes in hormones. So I've noticed, I tell you what, um, if my sleep is good, this is an example of where I, I get frustrated with the, the academic. So, you know, when we talked about, with the science, when you talk about calories in versus calories out, and then they try and bash like, Oh, they talk about make insulin a demon. They make cortisol sound like a demon. Those things are all good. Well, no, it's not a demon. It's all part of the body, but absolutely you affect sleep. That changes your hormone profile. Your hormone profile now changes your metabolism, which the rule, the law of thermodynamics still applies, but it's now changed for you. It's now different. You know, your calorie maintenance, which let's say, you know, for hypothetical reasons and for this argument's sake, your calorie maintenance was 2,500. That's what your body burns at rest all day long. And then all of a sudden you have two, three days in a row of poor sleep, your calorie maintenance is no longer 2,500. Your body is perceiving it as under stress. It slows down to conserve energy and save body and produce or save body of fat for energy. And so then your calorie maintenance now becomes 2,200 or 2,000. And so law of thermodynamics still applies. And yeah, if you're macros, but your macros are going to have to have been changed. You can't stay the same as what it was when you were getting great sleep because now you're, you're, it's a good point because I think a lot of times people, they assume that the, that your calorie burn aside from activity, because I don't, they don't assume it for activity, but if everything stays the same, but you change your stress, well, your calorie burn is a fixed number. No, it's not. A lot of stuff affects your calorie. Very, your, this whole idea that we're, we are stuck with a metabolism is hilarious. Yeah. Yes. Your metabolism can shift daily. You don't, you find your calorie maintenance out one day. I mean, in four weeks, it could be completely different. If you add a couple pounds of muscle and lose body fat, you reduce stress, you could, you could see a huge difference. And then we used to measure that with the body gym. Was that called? Yeah. Breathe into it. And I remember like being excited about that device because I was like, wow, you can actually find out like where they're at with their metabolism currently right now. And then, you know, you do it the next day, you do it the next week, you're getting completely different numbers based off of their stress. Yeah, I've had this happen now several, I had this happen to me several times with clients where I would have a, I'll give you an example of one client in particular. She was type A, go, go, go, like just the classic overdo everything type of person. She went, and this was early on in my career. So this actually learned, initially learned this through training her. So I was all about calories in versus calories out, how much you're burning, whatever. I'd have her truck her food. She'd show me her calories. Oh, you want to get leaner? We're just going to increase your activity level. And I would push that for a while. And we got stuck. We got stuck for a little while. And I remember thinking to myself like, okay, if I'm going to push her any harder, I got to give her some time to rest and recoup. So my idea wasn't, it would make her leaner. I thought I needed her to get some rest so we could go after it again later on. So I'm going to say, okay, for the next couple of months, here's what I want you to do, rather than running, you know, I forgot what days it were, but it's just for argument's sake, rather than running on Saturday and Wednesday, like you always do, where you do all your intervals and your long distance runs, what I want you to do is I want you to go take a relaxing meditation class and I want you to really focus on your sleep. And so she was like, well, what about my calories and what about, I'm not going to burn as much calories. And I said, look, I know we're not burning as many calories. I said, don't worry about it. We'll make up for it later on once I feel like your body's more recovered. Well, here's the crazy part. She did that. Not only did she not gain weight. She lost weight. She started to get leaner. I remember seeing the exact same thing. And it blew me away. I was like, how is this possible? She must be lying to me. And then I started to put it, piece it together, like, oh, her body's working better. She's just healthier. And so, and now what happened, that's happened over a dozen times. I had this conversation last night with my mom's husband right now. We were talking about stress and I was trying to explain to him that your body doesn't know the difference between a horn being honked, you lifting weights in the gym, the argument you had with your wife when you got home from work, your boss screaming at you. It's all stress. It's all stress. And if you're getting it from all ends, going to the gym and hammering your body, even though you, and this is what was hard to communicate to him, because he's like, I feel good. Yes. He goes, yeah, no, I love to go workout. And I had, and it's like, exactly. And that's the worst thing you could do in that state. I said, in fact, you get in a big argument with my mom or you have something that you're gonna fight at work with somebody like that. And you don't wanna go hammer the weights out. If you're gonna go to the weights, it should be more recuperative. Or maybe that's the day you decide to meditate or spend time walking. And then the day that you feel rested, no stress, everything else. That's the day you get after it. The reason why it's hard to understand for people is because it does feel good. Right. Because cortisol feels good. Here's the thing that people need to understand. We hear all the time about elevated cortisol and too much of it's not good or whatever. And by the way, cortisol has very fundamental roles in the human body. You don't wanna slam cortisol down cause that'll not make you healthy either. But here's the deal with cortisol. It feels good. If I gave you injections of cortisol, you'd have energy, you'd be hyped, it's your stress hormones. It's supposed to do that. So when you're super stressed- I live off that in the morning. Yeah. So it gets me out of bed. So if you're feeling shitty or whatever and you go to the gym and beat the crap out of yourself, you give yourself under the spike of cortisol, all of a sudden you feel better. Well, now because you're becoming a cortisol junkie, but eventually like we can become insulin resistant, our bodies stop utilizing cortisol very effectively. We need more and more of it then we start to develop problems.