 First question is from Nina Worgen. How do you know if you have metabolic damage or if you have a healthy metabolic rate? All right So first off to be clear the term metabolic damage was a term coined by the fitness industry Really to kind of illustrate or explain a slow metabolism, right? So somebody who'd metabolism naturally doesn't burn a lot of calories You know, I could say hey your metabolism doesn't burn a lot of calories But I could probably sell more stuff if I say you have metabolic damage. Okay, so that's that's an important thing feel bad about it Yeah, it's an important thing to and we've said it before I was gonna say I'm just as guilty It's a simple. It's an easy way to get somebody across like how you fucked up their metabolism It's right. We need to address it right but to be clear It doesn't mean that you're that you're sick or ill or unhealthy or something's wrong with your metabolism In fact, if your metabolism is not burning many calories Unless you are ill or you've really really starved yourself or really extreme in those cases. It's doing what it's supposed to do Yeah, you have a healthy metabolism It's slowing down because you've you've told it to you've taught it to slow down Through maybe reducing your calories for too long going on diets not being active Maybe training in a way that tells your body to have a slow metabolism lots of lots of Cardio no strength training for example can do that. So how do you know if you have a healthy metabolism? Well, if you're if you're unhealthy in other ways, then maybe something's going on But you're probably okay with your metabolism now if your question is how do I get my metabolism to speed up or Should I get my metabolism speed up? It's a very personal question. It's individual Do you are you happy with the amount of calories that you burn all the time on your own? Or do you find yourself feeling like you're starving eating your your daily caloric? Let's talk about so let's talk about some examples of where we've seen the most metabolic damage in other words Like what types of clients so what I feathers or ultra marathon right? So so what I what I see what I see this most common in like the clients that I would get that had this the most Severe metabolic damage and really what that is and I do that in air quotes because like Sal saying that it's not really damaged It's doing what you've told it to do But why is your metabolism so slow the people that? That tend to be the worst for me that I would get Our clients that were really overweight So they were beyond 50 pounds overweight and they had gained and lost weight for many many years up and down and many times It looked like this really hardcore restrict They they went on some crazy weird, you know lettuce or cabbage diet a lot or they would just eat way less or fast or Yeah, exactly They would do some really low calorie ways of losing weight and they would lose a bunch of weight that way And then they would go back and they would binge and they would do this yo-yo dieting for many years and and over time You know it went from they were 50 pounds overweight to 60 pounds overweight to 70 pounds and eventually a hundred pounds or so Overweight and they had been doing that to their their body That's case number one that I'd see that's most common with like somebody who has a really really slow metabolism The other is like what Justin was alluding to like your athletes or your competitors that are on lower type calorie diets And they have a lot of stress whether it be exercise running for a very long time Or just eating really really low calorie for a very very long time Those tend to be the most and with lots of stress those two things tend to be the most common like offenders for me as far as clients Yeah, especially if it's a lot of endurance type training That's where you start to see the metabolism Adapt really that's what's happening your metabolism is adapting so if you are doing an activity that requires very little strength And little muscle and you're doing a lot of it and doing that activity burns calories Then what will happen is your your body will start to adapt and the way it adapts is it says okay? We're burning lots of calories during this activity. We need endurance. We don't need a lot of muscle and strength Let's learn how to conserve calories. We pair muscle down We slow the metabolism down so that this person can continue to do this and become a more efficient better Endurance machine and so you see this with people who do like the cardio fanatics who come in and I would see these in the gym I'd manage gyms and there would be those members that would come in and they do the same thing every time They come in five or six days a week. They'd get on the elliptical for 40 minutes They'd get on the treadmill for 40 minutes They've got another piece of cardio for 40 minutes and they do that every day and then they'd be but they'd still be 25 or 30 pounds or so almost impossible to convince them otherwise because they've like conditioned it in their brain that whatever they eat They look at the calories of what they're eating and they want to equate that to the amount of calories that they're burning in the gym Not knowing that over this long period of time that they've been doing the same exact thing They've actually been slowing their metabolism down which now brings you know any excess of their Their maintenance calories was their maintenance calories goes down ends up starting to stack up against them Dude, there was a sky that used to come in and you guys probably because you guys were in Santa Teresa, too Black dude would wear sweater and do cardio and just sweat through the whole sweater Yeah, and he come in every morning every single morning this guy We used to have to tell him to put towels underneath his yeah underneath his bike. Yes So he did just that's all he did did cardio come in and do a ton of cardio. That's it And he was probably 20 pounds overweight So not like super overweight about 20 pounds But did cardio cardio cardio never touched the weights never touched the machines and I ended up striking up conversations with him Asked him what his goals are. Oh, I just want to maintain it So we'll do you know at the time I was trying to see if you'd be interested in training because I could see that he was doing the same thing all the time and I said well if you could have another goal, what would it be? So I'd like to get a little leaner. I said, oh, well Have you looked at your diet? And he goes oh I track my diet and we talked about diet and he did he had a booklet and he wrote everything down had all His calories now and this guy was consuming under 2,000 calories a day. He wasn't a small guy He was as tall as I was Probably, I don't know 200 pounds could you know stand to lose about 20 pounds eating under 2,000 calories a day would come in And do routinely an hour and a half of cardio Every single day and that was really one of the first times that were dawned on me It was like man this guy His body has learned to burn so few calories that he could literally 1800 calories is how he maintains 20 pounds overweight. Yeah, and so I talked to him about lifting weights I wasn't able to get through to him. He continued to do what he did But again, this is what your body does It just how you train your butt when you when we use the word workout switch that with the word train You are training your body when you're working out and the reason why you're training your body is you're training your body To get better at what you're teaching it to do or what your workouts are doing And if your workouts are high calorie burning require very little muscle Then your body is going to learn to adapt to that workout by slowing down its metabolism If your workouts don't necessarily burn a ton of calories, but require a lot of strength and muscle Well, now your body's like let's build this big. Let's build this muscle and we can be Less efficient with calories and speed up our burn I think this is so nuanced because it's this big spectrum You have like extreme metabolic damage on one side and then you have everything in the middle Like, you know, you have a healthy metabolism You have a metabolic like really extreme metabolic damage and then you have this everything in between and so it's so nuanced and Individualized that it's like where am I on that and it's all about what how you're training it So you can you don't have to be this extreme marathon runner to feel your metabolism slowing down You don't necessarily have to have metabolic damage to feel your metabolism slowing down If you eat less and less calories and exercise more and more and more Especially if you're doing things like cardio, which doesn't demand a lot of muscle You're teaching the body to become very efficient and not need a lot of calories