 Our first caller is Maddie from Maryland. Maddie, what's up, man? How can we help you? Hey, how's it going? First of all, I just want to thank you guys for being the best fitness podcast out there. Thank you guys so much. A little bit of a background about myself. I started working out around when I was 16 years old. I was pretty morbidly obese. I was like 280 pounds. And I dropped weight pretty quickly. Like in a year, I got to like 220. But ever since then, I've been fluctuating between being, I think, at the lowest 215 to 280, up and down. You guys know like the cliche story of basically someone who just does a lot of hit training, does a lot of high intensity workouts. I did, I did, at certain periods of my life, train for strength. But I never, until doing maps in a bollock, which was, I did, I started my first phase, I started my first run of maps in a bollock about six months ago. Up until that point, I never did like one structured program. I took programs online, like free, free programs. And I made some of my own programs, but I never had like a particular program. But I did lots of hit training. I did some strength training here and there, but nothing consistently. Now at the current set, I am now about 510, 250 pounds when I first started maps. Actually, when I first started maps, I was 228 pounds. But after listening to the podcast, I thought maybe I should bulk up a little bit to get my metabolism up. Because at that point, I wasn't dropping weight lower. And I was eating consistently around like 2,300 calories a day. And I wasn't dropping weight. So then for the first time doing maps, like all the phases, I was in a bulk. And I was just using my Fitbit to gauge where my calories should be. Whatever my Fitbit set up around that day, I was just eating that much food. And I got up to 250 pounds. Then after I finished maps for the first time, I started it again. And I guess about after the first phase, I went from 250 to about where I am now. No, I went from 250 to 244. And I sent you guys some body fat scans. I don't know if you saw, but basically from the from the end of the first phase of maps to where I am a couple of weeks ago, I dropped about 5% body fat, and I gained about five pounds of muscle. But my question is, right now I'm eating about 2,300 calories to 2,600 calories, give or take. I want to know, because I still have like a lot of body fat to drop. My biggest goal is to get to a healthy body fat range, which for me, like I think I want to be like 15% body fat, maintain that. But I feel like I'm worried that because of my past experience, I'm worried that I'm going to drop calories too low and go crazy there. Or I'm just going to be eating too much and be in a perpetual bulk. I just want to know where I should be with my eating in terms of my long term goal, which is getting to like 15% body fat. There's a lot there to help you with. Yeah. So, Marty, you, let me get this straight. You went from 215 to 250 during that first bulk. Are you talking about when I started maps? Yeah. No, no, no, no. I went from like 230, 230, 240 to 250. Okay. Which one is a 230 or 240? Because that's because a 20 pound bulk over the course of three months and a reverse diet is a lot. Unless you gain 20 pounds of muscle, which I don't. He gained five. That wasn't 20 pounds of muscle. I think it was like, I think it was like 238, 240. I mean, like my weight fluctuates a lot every day, so that's like the range I could give. Okay. Cause there's a couple of things here. First off, when you're trying to do a bulk in order to speed up the metabolism, you do want to do it slowly. So that's why I asked you that question. And if it was just like aggressive weight gain, then what that screams to me is you weren't tracking your reverse diet or your bulk. Well, he was, but he was going by his Fitbit, which I wouldn't recommend doing. Yeah. And sometimes what people do is they say, okay, I'm going to go on a bulk and they eat more than they should. And because it kind of gives them a little bit of, you know, looseness and they end up going too far. So, okay. So now we're, we're out of position here. We're eating 2,300 calories. You want to get that up higher so that you can burn body fat and then have a comfortable kind of maintenance position. And it's going to be the same thing. I'm going to recommend that you do a slow bulk. And I think you should do a slow bulk on a pretty consistent basis, but interrupt it with a week here and there of a maintenance or even a slight deficit. So it would be something like three or four weeks of a, you know, 400 calorie surplus. And then maybe a week of maintenance or a 100 calorie deficit and just kind of stay on that path and let your metabolism slowly build up. And it might take some time because of what you've done in the past with your body and kind of the tendencies that you're moving to. MAPS and Ebola is a great program for this. MAPS aesthetic, if you can handle more volume, would also be a great program for this. But that's where I would go. I would, I would, I would constantly and consistently with again, those interruptions of maybe a slight deficit work towards getting your metabolism to kind of speed up and give it some time. Don't do an aggressive bulk. Don't allow your weight to go up or fluctuate so heavily, but do it in a kind of a slow, comfortable pace and allow things to, to reverse out. I'll be even more specific. So I think we have enough information from where you were, where you're at right now, kind of what you did. And by the way, you didn't do a bad job. I think you were kind of close to be honest with you. I think the mistake was using the Fitbit as your guide to tell you, oh, eat more calories. Cause those things, those things, by the way, I love tools like that. So I use them like crazy. I used them all through competing. I think they're a great, another piece of data you can use to help kind of guide you. But if you use it as your true North, you can get in a little bit of trouble. And it sounds like that's what we did. It sounds like you allowed it to dictate your calories and you probably did a little more than you needed to. So yeah, so where you're at, this is what I would like to see. I'd like to see you at 2,500 calories a day for three weeks pretty consistently every, every fourth week, a week in a deficit to 2,100 calories. So that's only a 200 calorie surplus with a 200 calorie deficit for a week. And you're doing, you, the month average out is, I think, a better surplus for you. It's going to get you closer to what kind of salad is alluding to with the, you know, less of a calorie surplus and just focusing on, on bulking. So I think you had the right mindset. I think you were doing a pretty good job. I think you just kind of overshot it. It doesn't take that many extra calories. And one of the best ways to ensure that you don't continue to stay on that path of over consuming is by interrupting it. Like Sal was saying, I'd interrupt it for a full week in that week, I would keep myself in about a 200, 300 calorie deficit for that whole week, and then go back to the bulk. Every time you go back to the bulk, my goal for you, if I was, you were my client, would to see if I can inch you up a little bit more. So let's say the first three weeks, I say, okay, Marty, I want you to be at 2,500 calories. Let's hopefully kind of maintain your weight. I don't want to see a big fluctuation. A couple pounds up, I'm not worried. But if I see you moving up pretty fast, I might pull back a little bit. But I'd like to see you kind of stay with your weight around where you're at right now, while also knowing that I have you in a little bit of a surplus. I'd like to keep you there at 2,500 for three weeks. Then I put you in that deficit for one week. And then when we go back to the surplus again, I might go to a 2,550 or 2,600. And then and that would be the goal is to just kind of give you an extra 50 to 100 calories, you know, every fourth week until I can get you up to a place where you're like 2,800 or 3,000. And I know you said on your, I don't you didn't say it to the audience, but you wrote it in your thing that you feel good. You're comfortable at 2,300 calories. So that tells me a lot as a coach that, okay, he likes eating around here. So my goal is to probably get you up to 28 to 3,000 so I could then pull you back down to 23 to where you're eating comfortably, but then your body is nice, consistently losing weight. Now, did you say you're running Maps Anabolic? And is that the program you run right now? Yeah, I'm running Maps Anabolic. Basically what I do because the gym is so packed whenever I get off work, I usually run it two to three days a week. But what I do is some days, depending on how packed the gym is, I'll split the workouts in half. So I do like half of day one on Monday and then the other half on Tuesday and then go to work out number two, etc. That's fine. Okay. Yeah, I like that. What do you guys think about like tracking progress though? Because the thing is, is like, I do want to drop the weight, but like I understand that the muscle mass is what's really important. I feel good whenever I have more muscle, but the thing is whenever your body fat percentage is so high, it's hard to see like that reflection in the mirror. Should I just continue to get body fat scans? I know that they're not the most relaxed out there. They're not, but if you're using the same one and you're consistent like every month, it actually will be a great gauge. You'll see the trend. Yeah, you'll see a trend. So don't get don't get so hung up on if it says 25% or 12%. It doesn't matter what the percentage is so much. It's okay, you have a baseline wherever it's at right now. And then as a coach, if I give you this instruction to now increase your calories, and we follow exactly what I said on that one month mark, I'm going to want you to retest. And the only thing we're looking at is the difference of where you were when I told you to do the calorie surplus and to follow what I said and where you're at body fat percentage. And if I did my job really well, you've added muscle and lost a little bit of fat and really haven't moved that much on the scale. And if I see a major fluctuation south or north, I'm going to adjust as a coach. So if I see at a month that your body fat percentage went up, okay, well, we added too many calories. I should have only added a little bit, like maybe 50 calories and I'd go the other direction. Now, if I noticed that you didn't really move very much at all, I might go the other direction. So use that as just kind of a compass for you, not so much, you know, hung up on the percentage, but if and use the same, same place or whatever you're using, use that same, same tool every time, same day, same time, make sure you're like this, if you did it in the morning where you weren't fed, you didn't drink much, all that stuff matters, you can really manipulate those. That's the negative part of those things is if one time you did it on Thursday at three o'clock in the afternoon after you've had two or three meals and a half a gallon of water, and then the next time you test, you test first thing in the morning on Friday, dry, no water, no food, that could really fuck this, the swing up and you want to be very consistent with how you do it and then that will really help us decide which way we should go. And if you're not in the forum already, we'll put you in the forum so you can kind of check in with us. So do you have the forum yet? I do not. Okay, so I'll have Doug get you access to the forum and then when you hit that one month mark, give us a screenshot of the before three weeks ago, four weeks ago, excuse me, body fat test to now and then the guys and I could really easily adjust you from there. You could throw and also monitor your strength. If your strength is going up, that's a good sign. You can also use circumference, that's another one. Your waist is just your waist measurement for men that is a relatively accurate, consistent way to measure fat gain or fat loss because we tend to store body fat around our waist. I mean, that's it. If you got strength or circumference of your waist, the consistent body fat test, you'll have a really good idea of the trend of the direction you're going. I like strength though the most because if your strength is going up and your weight is staying the same or it's going down, there's a good chance you're building muscle and burning body fat. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I just want to thank you guys so much because literally other programs, you just feel, I feel so tired and depleted and I know this is probably compared to the past. This is the time where I'm eating at a slight deficit and I'm just getting so much stronger and it's just like what am I, what is this program? It's really fun. I just really appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for what you do. It's magic for sure. Thanks for calling in. Thanks, Marty. Of course, thank you. Yeah, when you're dealing with somebody who's been really heavy in the past and then they're trying to reverse out, it can be a slow process and it can be really challenging to stay consistent with that. Well, I think you hit it right on the head when you said to him about, you know, we tell people to go in a bulk and they kind of, you know, oh cool, I'm on a bulk and if you follow the Fitbit and you allow it to tell you how many calories you burn, I mean, you can manipulate the shit out of that thing. So again, I think I like the Fitbit the most out of all of us, but I'm very careful to not, that's not my end. I never used it for like that, like telling me what I should do. Yeah, really what it is, is the more metrics you have, the clearer the picture. If it's just one metric, it's not trends. Yeah, like if it's just body weight, I mean, that doesn't tell you a whole lot body weight plus body fat percentage. Now you know more body fat percentage weight and circumference. Okay, now we're starting to see a clear picture. Now what about your strength? Now we see the whole thing. That's right. And that's the, that's the key because if you just go off one met, I mean, if like if it's just weight on the scale, I mean, that's, I can manipulate that seven pounds in one day, you know, and same thing with those body scans. So when you look at all of them, you get a much clearer picture. And what you want to do is look at the trend, not necessarily stressing over the fact that it went up a half percent or whatever over the last two weeks, but rather over the last three months, which direction is this moving?