Increase Metabolism, Starvation Mode, Reverse Dieting, Fat Loss, and Muscle Gain - Answering Your Most Common Questions

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Partial Transcript: Hello, beautiful people. And welcome back to the show today. We are going to talk about fat loss, maintenance, muscle gain body. Recomposition all of these crazy terms that everyone throws around. And I don't really think that there's much explanation on the basics anymore. And I don't really know why I'm seeing that trend to maybe it's. 

I mean, algorithms are so weird. Maybe I'm seeing something different, but I'm seeing so many common questions under  the videos on complex topics. That are very foundational. And I think that sometimes revisiting the foundations, if you think about who's making content in any industry anybody that is somewhat of an expert or has built a following because of their knowledge on something. That person is in that. Bubble. Every single day. They're only thinking about those things for as long as you think about whatever you work with, whatever you do day to day, whether you have kids and that's that's your life or your job is to manage a bunch of other people. And that takes up all your time. You're doing that thing for the bulk of your hours when you are in, for example, the fitness bubble that I live in. In the fitness bubble, we use ridiculous vernacular and all of these weird words to describe things. And there's different names for the same movements and all of those things, nobody would ever fucking know. Why would you know that I spend all day doing this? So of course I know those things,  what happens is the people making the content, are those people living in the bubbles and the bubble, you forget that the basics in your bubble are not the basics and other people's bubbles. What I really want to do with this is get down to the basics to make sure you understand about these things. Not so much exactly what they are, but really how they apply and what they actually look like in practice. And what if this, and what if that, that's what I want to get into with these things, because I think these terms are thrown around and oftentimes misunderstood or misinterpreted, and it can lead you to just not doing the right things. 

And nobody wants to make mistakes when they're on any sort of like fat. Loss journey or fitness journey wasting time is wasting time. So I'm going to try to not waste any more of yours. Let's get right into it. Let's start with calorie deficit versus, you know, clean, eating, all of that good stuff. 

This is a ridiculous argument. Because to say that one is the most important. Is. Uh, a massive oversimplification. In any way you spin it and you see people that have like very, very influential platforms like preaching that calories are the only thing that matters and sour patch kids for dinner. And I FYM. Or it's like the complete opposite end of the spectrum, like test your blood sugar every time you eat. Cause that's fucking normal. Humans have been around for quite some time, eating, doing things. We weren't testing our blood sugar. There's new foods. There's a, I get it. However to think that only eating bullshit, because it's in the right quantitative amounts of these macronutrients or thinking that every gram of sugar is going to kill you. 

Everything needs to be organic. You can't eat

Transcript

Hello, beautiful people. And welcome back to the show today. We are going to talk about fat loss, maintenance, muscle gain body. Recomposition all of these crazy terms that everyone throws around. And I don't really think that there's much explanation on the basics anymore. And I don't really know why I'm seeing that trend to maybe it's. 

I mean, algorithms are so weird. Maybe I'm seeing something different, but I'm seeing so many common questions under  the videos on complex topics. That are very foundational. And I think that sometimes revisiting the foundations, if you think about who's making content in any industry anybody that is somewhat of an expert or has built a following because of their knowledge on something. That person is in that. Bubble. Every single day. They're only thinking about those things for as long as you think about whatever you work with, whatever you do day to day, whether you have kids and that's that's your life or your job is to manage a bunch of other people. And that takes up all your time. You're doing that thing for the bulk of your hours when you are in, for example, the fitness bubble that I live in. In the fitness bubble, we use ridiculous vernacular and all of these weird words to describe things. And there's different names for the same movements and all of those things, nobody would ever fucking know. Why would you know that I spend all day doing this? So of course I know those things,  what happens is the people making the content, are those people living in the bubbles and the bubble, you forget that the basics in your bubble are not the basics and other people's bubbles. What I really want to do with this is get down to the basics to make sure you understand about these things. Not so much exactly what they are, but really how they apply and what they actually look like in practice. And what if this, and what if that, that's what I want to get into with these things, because I think these terms are thrown around and oftentimes misunderstood or misinterpreted, and it can lead you to just not doing the right things. 

And nobody wants to make mistakes when they're on any sort of like fat. Loss journey or fitness journey wasting time is wasting time. So I'm going to try to not waste any more of yours. Let's get right into it. Let's start with calorie deficit versus, you know, clean, eating, all of that good stuff. 

This is a ridiculous argument. Because to say that one is the most important. Is. Uh, a massive oversimplification. In any way you spin it and you see people that have like very, very influential platforms like preaching that calories are the only thing that matters and sour patch kids for dinner. And I FYM. Or it's like the complete opposite end of the spectrum, like test your blood sugar every time you eat. Cause that's fucking normal. Humans have been around for quite some time, eating, doing things. We weren't testing our blood sugar. There's new foods. There's a, I get it. However to think that only eating bullshit, because it's in the right quantitative amounts of these macronutrients or thinking that every gram of sugar is going to kill you. 

Everything needs to be organic. You can't eat without anxiety. Like everything's clean. Neither are correct. And that's a ridiculous thing to do is to promote that only one or. One is correct. First of all, it's going to be a very different split between those two different things, depending on who you are and what you are good with. So for somebody that lives a very social life and like maybe they have to go to business dinners or they're at events all the time that person having a massively restrictive diet is going to bleed into their life. 

Like it is going to be obvious to them every single time. They're at these events and they can't eat anything versus the other end of the spectrum. If you are so obsessed with counting your macros, . You're not going to eat a banana because you want to have candy later. Like that is wrong too. There's a disconnect here both matter. And it's also matter for what, like, no one's asking this question. Calories are going to determine what you weigh. If you burn more calories than you take in, you will lose weight. . That being said. Wait is not fat. 

We also have to pay attention to macronutrients, right. Which is still on the calorie side of things. When we pay attention to macronutrients, that's going to help determine what our weight is made out of. So is it muscle? Are we maintaining muscle and losing fat? Or are we losing like 50 50 of both? Resistance training plays into that. Just an example. On the other end of things. Wait can also be inflammation. Weight can be constipation.  Weight can be retained. Water.   If we're eating like shit. All the time, your body isn't going to like that. At a cellular level, you can lose weight. Somebody out there when, on a diet where they only Twinkies, this was also done with a big Mac. Um, Every single day by Jordan Sighet, but a little bit different, but there was a man that only ate Twinkies. That was the whole thing, but he was in a calorie deficit and he lost weight. And that's like the big argument for like calories are the only thing that matters. However, did anybody ask this man, if he's okay or how he feels? 

Because he probably feels like he's going to die. There's no protein, no fiber, not a nutrient to be found. Like he probably felt like dog shit and that matters. And it's also, if you're really going to talk about how it affects, like your weight in the scale is the thing that we're going to talk about. You're going to hold onto a lot more water inflammation, puffiness, all of that. 

 If you are eating just bullshit all the time, your body needs nutrients. Your body also needs a certain amount of calories for how much it's going to weigh. Your body also needs certain things in certain stimuli to make sure that a nice percentage of your muscle is staying on your body while you are losing the fat or that if you're gaining muscle, you're not gaining a ton of fat with it.  When we talk about a maintenance phase, all that means is that calories in calories out are relatively steady. Most of the time it's going to look like this, the overlapping graphs. However, it's not necessarily that it's completely the same every single day. It's just that over time you're averaging out. 

So your weight stays the same. Now this is not different necessarily than body recomposition.  Body recomposition is a form of maintenance. Or sometimes they slight deficit. So body recomposition means you are staying roughly the same weight or losing very little. You are aiming to increase the amount of muscle mass you have and decrease the amount of fat you have. It is much easier to do this simultaneously as a new person to training. It becomes much more challenging once you're a very trained individual, you followed any sort of progressions for any serious amount of time. That being said. Most people are not actually eating the same exact amount every single day. Most of us are up and down a little bit. Most of us are some days, a little higher, some days a little lower. Oh, I wasn't that hungry yesterday. Today I was starving. Whatever is, we're not completely, even sometimes body recomposition can just happen. If you're a person that kind of just stays at maintenance. 

If you start working out and increase your protein over time, you will become a more muscular individual with less fat on your body for roughly the same body weight. If you don't change anything else. That is the specificity of maintenance. Maintenance itself is important because your body needs to feel safe in order to go into another fat-loss phase, you can be above maintenance for much longer than you can be in a deficit, but your body will start slowing things down. If you are chronically in a deficit, I do want to touch on this because starvation mode is this big rumor, starvation mode is not real. People would not die of starvation. If starvation mode. It's real.  What is real metabolic adaptation? It sounds fancy. It's not. Metabolic adaptation is when your body goes, oh shit. Not a lot of food around here. And it makes some changes. Your body is a bank account of calories. Calories are energy. It's your body's currency to get shit done. Heartbeat brain function. All of these things take calories. When we are massively restricting calories, fad, dieting, super low, anything like that. That tells your body it's not safe when your body doesn't feel safe, it's not going to go into starvation mode and store fat more easily. That's not how it goes. What will happen is the non-essential functions of your body, AK the things to your body that it deems not essential. Sex drive your hair shiny. Your skin looks nice. You have a morning Boehner. Your period is painless. 

All of these things. When your body deemed something non-essential, it's going to down-regulate it. You're going to fidget less things like walking around when you're on the phone, you're going to naturally down-regulate and expel and use and burn less calories. You aren't going to notice these things unless you're really deepen, then you'll notice. However, it's not something that is voluntary, involuntary, or like storing fat in any crazy way. It's just your body evolutionarily adopting your body doesn't know that your starving it on purpose. Like your body has no idea. It's not on your team here. Think back to caveman times, you can almost explain anything and nutrition. If you think back to caveman times. If you were starving in caveman times, what is your body gonna do? It's gonna motivate you to go get food because why the fuck else would you go out in the snow, out of your nice little cave with your cave family, to go fight a lion to eat for dinner. If you're not motivated by hunger, that's why hunger is so motivating and so strong and so hard to overcome because your body's like don't, don't overcome it. Eat. Because there's such a hyper availability of food. Obviously this becomes a problem for a reason  it's not super unclear. Why obesity exists? 

a downregulation of certain functions within the body is not the same thing as storing fat more easily. So in order to avoid this downregulation periods of maintenance, at least 16 to 18 weeks in a row. Ish. Need to be at maintenance or above. If you are dieting for more than 16 weeks, more than once, maybe twice a year, maybe. Your body is going to slowly trust you less. These things are going to downregulate more effectively. 

 Anorexia, I think has portrayed a little bit glamorously like anorexia at its worst is such a horrible, horrible, horrible thing to deal with. Your teeth are yellow. Your hair is falling out in clumps. Your skin is flaking off all of these things that are yes, quote unquote non-essential to live, but your body is saving anything that you're giving it at all to pump blood through your veins and operate. At your brain, which takes an insane amount of calories. There's an, a statistic about chess players and how many calories they burn through like a tournament in a day. I'll have to find it. Jamie, pull that up. When you are using all of these calories for those things, and there's nothing left, these non-essential functions get bad. Really bad. Your skin turns yellow, your liver stops working. Like all of these things are terrible. This is the extreme version of metabolic downregulation. And I want you to understand that it's just a spectrum of it. This can be extremely serious, but this can also be something that is easily corrected in a month.  Reverse dieting is the mystery child of this group. Reverse dieting is slowly adding calories to basically do the opposite of metabolic downregulation. So when you do a reverse diet, which I do want to say, there's not tons of literature that this works. I personally have used it with clients and it's gone fabulously and I continue to use it because I really do believe that it works. 

I've also seen a lot of clients that tracking that closely, like just isn't really the thing for them, and that's not the best option. So we do something a little bit different, but this idea of slowly adding food over time, when you do this very incrementally, very, very slowly. You can reverse that as your body starts to have more calories available, you're not going to start storing tons of fat. If you do this slowly, you're going to start allocating those calories to the correct functions. AK restoring all of those things that we just talked about. Again, not tons to back this up. I fully believe in it. Do your own research  

so if we're doing a muscle gain phase, right. We're doing a muscle gain phase. We should be eating more calories than we're burning. However. 

People do it bulk. And then the bulk continues for way longer than it was supposed to. And people think that they need to add 500 calories every day. You don't. Um, you will not put on muscle at that rate. And if you would like to, there are steroids as an option. There's not protein as an option.  You're not going to get what you want out of that I think bulking is this really fun idea and that everyone's like, I'm going into like, you know, a surplus. This is awesome. This is dope. I'm going to do a muscle gain phase. I'm going to eat so much. And it's like 200 calories more a day on average for most people like up to maybe like three or 400, if you're a really big dude, but this is not something where you're adding a thousand calories a day by any stretch of the imagination and thinking that that's going to translate into muscle gain and not a bunch of Batman's gain as well. You will gain muscle. Let me make myself perfectly fucking clear. 

You'll gain a ton of muscle, especially if your macros and workouts are on point, you will gain a ton of fat and you all have a hell of a fat loss phase ahead of you. What I. I find most people actually want, despite the fun  of the journey, we just went on. I think most people want to gain minimal fat. There is not much you can do naturally to completely eliminate that gain in any regard. And during a bulking phase, there are things you can do to make sure it's not the majority and make sure that you're gaining way more muscle than you are gaining fat, but you're going to gain some fat as well. 

The point. The point is not to have it be. 60% fat and 40% muscle that you gained. And then you have 60% that to lose. So you can even see the muscle you put on. So. That is the idea of muscle gain. Overall. Everything. I just said. Everything. I just went through, I think can work phenomenally for people. I think, especially with like a coaches help guiding you through these different phases. I also think most people should establish a way of eating. They can do every single day. And that if tracking and doing all of these phases and things, If you're just like  like clocks out of five goes home is a great dad to his kids, like kisses. His wife has dinner and has like the perfect little life. Like why, why are you ruining it with. Like obsessively counting macros.  If you can't do this in relation to the level of the goals you have, or like the lifestyle you're living, like if you're an athlete, obviously I'm going to expect any athlete I work with to be pretty fucking on point. Like there's really no excuse not to it's your job. However, if it's not your job, And this sounds like a lot and you're way off. And it's causing you stress every single day. I think establishing habits and ways of setting up your environment so that you don't actually have to have all of this willpower every fucking day. Atomic habits speaks to so much. And I'm obsessed with that book because it's so true. If you put the Oreos out in the garage and it's not easy to grab them anymore and you don't see them every fucking day, you replace it with apples that are sitting out on the counter. 

You might not eat a single apple. I'm not going to sit here and lie to you, but your ass isn't going to go get Oreos every single time you would have grabbed one out of the cabinet. If you were just walking by. It can make a massive difference to set yourself up for success. Like don't set yourself up to fail and then be like, I'm a fucking failure. This is terrible. I'm a failure. You're not a failure. You set yourself up to feel like you failed because you aren't going to have all of the willpower in the world on a Friday afternoon after you've worked a full week, you've had every responsibility that comes with just existing as a human, like there's a huge list of them. It's a lot.  If we can just make it less stressful to succeed. You're going to succeed. Fucking easier. 

The last thing I want to touch on is metabolism. 

Metabolism AK that metabolic downregulation, we talked about, everyone talks about ramping up your metabolism. Like what is fucking metabolism? People talk about metabolism. Like it's a bone in your body. You can point to like my metabolism. I'm like, that's not. What this is at all. First of all. So what is metabolism? Metabolism is not a thing. Metabolism is a total. Your metabolism is a total of every single function in your body coming together. What does it cost your body energy wise? To run all those functions. For example, workouts are like the least of your body's worries, like pumping blood. And again, like brain function, all of that, but say a workout just for kind of simplicity sake. We can all picture that you burn 200 calories in a workout. 

Every contraction, your muscles at every pump of your heart, every respiration increased to, you know, get that wind. Every single thing you do in this regard is costing your body calories. Metabolism is largely made up  of the functions that we don't control. You don't think about your heart beating to make it be. Even breathing is on that list. Like, yes, you can think about your breath. You can hold your breath. And like now you're probably going to hold your breath. Are you holding your breath? Are you holding your breath? 

Don't hold your breath  because they cost calories for your body to run them or execute them. Your body's thinking only about surviving your metabolic rate is always going to favor conserving energy. If it feels like we need to. Ways to quote, increase your metabolism. AKA you burn more calories by doing the same things. The first thing and probably the thing that is the easiest you have the most control over. Is to carry more muscle on your body. Muscle is very metabolically active. All that means is that it's fucking expensive for your body to maintain muscle. So if we're giving our body resistance training and we're giving our body enough protein, we are going to maintain that muscle. And that muscle is going to cost our body a lot of calories just to exist for the day. 

That's a big deal. So have half of the massive you is now burning more calories just to exist. Exist than it did when it was fat mass. That makes a big difference. That is the difference between going on vacation and having, you know, nothing crazy happened, but you're not eating according to plan, you come back and you're like, I didn't even gain weight. That's crazy. You have more leeway. The next thing you can do is just get in the habit of doing things the slightly longer way around. 

So parking farther away from the store getting 10,000 steps, like just be moving more. There's this example that I gave to a client a while ago,  and she loved it and I actually thought about it and I really like it too. So I'll share it with you now. When you're on a treadmill and you're walking and the calories are like slowly taking up and you're like just kind of slow, but like whatever, it's at least moving that is happening when you're just walking around day to day, it doesn't change this because there's a screen in front of you. So you should be walking like all the time. 

I'm a huge fan of steps. We all know this, but. Think about carrying as much muscle as you can feeding your body, the things that it needs to thrive, making sure your calorie balance is appropriate for what you're looking for. And then making sure that you're not spending too long, challenging your body to starve because it's going to get angry. 

It's going to think there's a famine. It's going to be like, what the fuck? And it's gonna make you sleepy.

If you got any value from this episode, I really would appreciate if you rated the show or left it a review, it is, it makes my day like. You guys have no idea really makes my day. 

I also have a special offer up on Patrion right now for you guys. I'm going to also do polls and stuff on there. So if you want to vote on future episodes or give input there, um, it's cheap. It's all of my resources ever. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you made it to the end comment on YouTube, say hello, I'm excited. This is on YouTube. And I will see you guys in the next one. That guys.