 First question is, fit with weight's mama. How long does it take for a metabolism to recover? After years of a 1200 calorie diet, I reverse dieted and am now at 2100 calories and have been lifting for five months. I am seeing great strength progress, but I am wondering when it's okay to start cutting calories for a more aesthetic look and how do I know my metabolism won't get jacked up again? All right, so when someone says metabolism recover, we gotta be very clear. What they mean is faster, right? I get a faster metabolism because the truth is the metabolism is doing what it's supposed to do. Yeah, it was never broken. Yeah, it wasn't broken. You were just eating a low calorie and you were probably exercising wrong. Programming it wrong. And so it just slowed down. So the question is, okay, how long does it take before my metabolism's really fast? Well, so far you've done pretty damn good job. You've gone almost up 1000 calories. You're at 2100 calories. What I don't know is did your body fat go up within that period of time? Were you able to maintain your body fat percentage, increase your calories and just get stronger? In which case I'd say, you're doing pretty darn good. If you've been able to, I mean, even if you put on some body fat, if you were to put on mostly muscle, you're doing phenomenal. Cause you're not just adding a thought. You're damn near doubling. So the increase is almost, I mean, that's huge. So yeah, yeah, that's a great place to be. Yeah, the place to cut is when you're at a place where you feel comfortable cutting and maintaining. In other words, let's say you're at 2100 calories and you bring it down to 1600 calories and that gets you lean. Are you now comfortable staying around 1600 calories? Now that doesn't mean you have to stay at 1600. You could always reverse diet from there. But that's the idea, right? The idea is, do I have room to go down in order to get leaner? For most women, I would say, I like to keep them around, or I like to get them to around the low 2000s, at least 22, 2300, 2400. Be real nice to get up to 2500 before starting to cut. Five months is pretty good. That's a pretty fast progression. I've worked with, I mean, I had some female clients that, it took us a year to get to the point. Yeah, to get to the point where things sped up a little bit because the body is just, obviously you were stressing it so much before. It adapted in a particular way. And a five month reversal of that is not bad at all. It's actually pretty damn good. There are some numbers that we're missing here, too. They're like, we don't know her size, right? So, I mean, if she, 2100 is pretty good for the average female. Yeah, she's like 130 pounds. Yeah, right, but if she's 280 pounds, you're still really low. So it really does depend on the kind of where you're at. But if you're average size, I think that's a pretty good place. Now here's the thing, too. If this was my client and she was coming to me and telling me that, hey, I'm looking to, I want to lean out at him. We've been doing this calorie increase for the last five months and I feel good. I'm getting stronger. I'm eating more. I'm not putting on a bunch of body fat, but I would like to summers around the corner. Let's lean down a little bit. I would do like a three-on-one off type of three weeks of cut, one week of bolt to maintenance. And that's what we would start to do for a while. And doing that is gonna keep you in a really good place, right? You're not gonna be in this 1200 calorie deficit for an extended period of time. If you're having a nice calorie surplus every third week, you should be in a pretty good place. And I'm also would not allow you to go down to 1200 calories. I'd probably run something around 1500, 1600 calories for those three weeks. And then I would run like a 2100 calorie week in a surplus or maintenance, right? And be going back and forth with that. I think with doing that, you should see yourself lean out pretty nice. I agree. I think the trouble happens from being consistently trying to hit a deficit. That's right. Always, always hitting a deficit. And then combining that with a lot of manual calorie burning lots and lots of cardio. That tends to be the issue. But strength training with the reverse diet and then strength training with the cut and the cut being interrupted with, like Adam said, a week or four days where you're at maintenance or hire is probably a good strategy to get yourself lean without getting too much of that slowed down in the metabolism.