Frequently Asked Questions

The reality is this is what creates body composition changes. So whether we are trying to lose weight or gain weight, I.e. burn body fat or build muscle is my assumption of what those two goals lead to depending on who you are I guess. No matter what, we have to create either a deficit or a surplus, which means that we need to burn more calories than we’re taking in, if we are trying to lose fat or lose weight, and we need to take in more calories than we are burning, if we’re trying to build muscle or gain weight. It’s a simple equation. It’s an energy balance equation. Calories in, needs to be different than calories out, and either which way depending on what our goal is.

So the reason this is so important is because it quite literally is the way to change your body composition. Whether you are tracking calories or not, whether you’re tracking macros or not. You need to find a way in order to create a favorable energy balance for your goal. So if you want to lose weight, that means we need to add up all of our ways of tracking or just knowing what our calorie expenditure is. And a lot of times I don’t have clients actually track this, because I don’t think it’s always necessary, but we need to make sure that all the different ways that we can burn calories, NEAT, so non exercise activity thermogenesis, which is walking to go grab groceries, it’s fidgeting, it’s me talking, it’s things like that, our digestion. So our body actually digesting food is another way to actually burn more calories.

It doesn’t mean eat more to digest and burn more. It just means that our body burns calories in order to do that, maintain the muscle and the tissues on our body, whether we’re talking about bodily tissues, skeletal muscle, so on and so forth. What we have on our body, everything in our body, it takes energy to preserve and just sustain and maintain. Therefore, we burn calories just at rest because of that. So there’s a lot of things that add into this that don’t even have anything to do with actually going and training or doing cardio.

However, all of these things put together gives us how much calories we are actually burning, which is our total daily energy expenditure. We need to make sure that, that amount is greater than the amount we’re taking in, so the amount of calories we burn has to be more than the calories we are taking in. That creates a caloric deficit. This deficit leads to fat loss. It allows our body to actually burn stored fat, aka weight, and us to lose weight. If we want to build muscle, we have to flip that equation into the positive, which means I have to take in more calories than I’m actually expanding through all these different things that I just explained.

The reality of it all is, this equation, this calories in versus calories out, is very important for body composition changes simply because it is what leads to body composition changes. It’s documented in science and there’s no way for us to prove it wrong because it is the reality, it is what is correct.

So the reason we focus on macros with so many of our clients is pretty simple. Macros are a way for us to individualize your caloric intake. Your calories are the most important thing that is gonna allow you to change your body composition. Whether you want to gain muscle or you want to burn fat. No matter what, we need to create a caloric deficit or surplus. How we create that caloric surplus, is very individual. Because you are going to have different cravings. You are gonna have different performance needs. You’re gonna have different fuel needs. You’re gonna have different hormonal profiles. You’re gonna have different age, you’re gonna be a different gender. There’s so many things that go into it. The amount of muscle mass you have, your insulin sensitivity and “carb tolerance.”

All these things add up and kind of create your individuality or your individual profile. Depending on all of those factors that we just went over and depending on all these factors with my clients, this is what determines what I feel is going to be best for their macronutrients, because now I know what their calories need to be and now I can determine how much protein, carbs, and fats I think that individual needs. An example, carbs are kind of looked at as a scaled nutrient. The reason I say that is because the more you perform, the more muscle mass you have and the harder you train, the more carbs we’re gonna need in your diet, because you will not be able to continually perform that hard or recover from the training you are doing, let alone maintain the muscle mass you have on your body, if you’re not consuming enough carbohydrates.

What this means for you is that I’m probably gonna have you on a higher carb, lower fat diet. I also have to be 100% positive that I’m giving you enough fats to support your nervous system and your hormonal profile. Because those two things play a major role in also performing, maintaining muscle mass, burning fat, so on and so forth. So there’s a lot that goes into this, but the main reason we use macros is, I guess you could say the key tool in our nutrition coaching is because it’s the most specific tool we can use in order to guide you to the result. It’s literally a roadmap and a tool that we can use as a metric to tweak, adjust, assess, and plan accordingly to get you exactly where you wanna be.

It’s the tool that I can use to individualize your caloric intake. So no matter what calories you need to be taking to reach your goal, I can tweak these macros to make sure that A, you’re gonna adhere to those calories better. And B, you’re gonna hit your goals that much faster. And it gives me a metric to adjust along the way. Because there’s many times where I can tweak macros while keeping you at your caloric intake and still see results. That’s a huge positive, because now I don’t have to take calories away from you in order to continue seeing fat loss. I can tweak Macros, add refeeds, add a diet break, manipulate hormones via macronutrients without ever even touching calories.

So back to the whole question in the first place. The reason we use macros with so many of our clients is because it’s the most accurate tool to adjust your plan along the way. And it’s also the most accurate individualization tool to make sure that you can not only adhere to the plan better, but feel better while we hit your calories along the way. So a lot that goes into that

This is a pretty controversial one, and a lot of people have different opinions on it. But, whether or not you should eat as many calories on your rest days as your training days, really is determined … It depends, first of all. It’s really determined by your output and your expectations of your training. And what I mean by that is, if your number one goal is to build muscle, you probably don’t want to be cycling calories in and out, because you want your calories to be high all the time. If you’re mainly targeting performance or strength, it’s the same exact thing.

I don’t want you to lower calories on a rest day and then go into your training session the next day feeling like shit, and not performing well, because you didn’t have enough calories to support recovery in your future performance yesterday. See, when we consume nutrients, specifically carbohydrates and protein, our body breaks it down, digests it, and utilizes it later on. It stores it as muscle glycogen and then later uses it. So what I consume for breakfast this morning, and then went and trained an hour later, it can give me a little bit of fuel, but unless it’s highly branched cyclic dextrin, which is a fast molecular carbohydrate that gets absorbed in the intestine like that, and goes right into the bloodstream. Unless you’re eating something like that, it’s not gonna be digested right away. It’s probably gonna take hours to digest, hours to absorb. Then it’s gonna store as muscle glycogen and then it’s gonna get used later on.

So the reality of this morning’s training session, is that it was fueled by last night’s carb based meal, which means if I took my carbs and calories down yesterday, because it was a rest day, then I’m gonna have less fuel for today to perform hard. And if my goal is building muscle or performing at my best, I’m gonna have subpar performance every time I do that. Therefore, carb cycling or cycling your calories up and down, might not be the best strategy. Now when fat loss is the goal, it’s a completely different scenario. The reality of fat loss is your weekly caloric intake is the biggest predominant factor that leads to fat loss, which means at the end of the week, if my calories are blank, if I create that caloric balance like we talked about before, if we create that caloric balance, and it’s in check at the end of the week, I’m gonna lose weight.

It doesn’t matter if I have high carb, low carb doesn’t matter. As long as my calories meet their quota at the end of the week, I am good. What that means for you, is if you enjoy having high carb days verse low carb Days, high calorie days verse low calorie days, then you should do it, because that allows you to adhere better and your number one goal is fat loss, not performance, or muscle gain. So I kind of go back and forth on this. It’s all dependent on the person. The reality is, is if your calories equate at the end of the week, you’re gonna see your results and that’s the most important factor.

This really depends, and this is something I’m gonna refer to my podcast and blog on nutritional periodization. Nutritional periodization is the idea that we periodize fat loss phases along the way to our result. So if we have a goal in six months, it might not be advantageous to go into a caloric deficit and chase fat loss for six months straight. The only time this would be the< advanced Tejas route to take, is probably gonna be if you’re getting on stage. If you’re a bikini competitor, a physique competitor, a bodybuilder and you have a six month long prep.

However, there are going to be periods of times throughout that prep that you implement what are called diet breaks or refeeds. Multiple days in a row, anywhere from two all the way up to 14, depending on how hard you are dieting, where you go up to maintenance calories, and let your body kind of just rejuvenate and refresh your hormones and your metabolism will kind of “repair” or just kind of normalize again, and it kinda just gives your body a break physiologically so that you can go back into the diet and make progress once again without harming your body’s health.

And also suffering performance wise, joint health, inflammation and strengths, so on and so forth. So the periodization is the idea of implementing these diet breaks, implementing maintenance phases and implementing surpluses throughout the process of reaching your physical. So another example is if somebody comes to me with a year long plan, or goal they want to get to a specific physique in a year, we’re going to spend time maintaining, we’re gonna spend time gaining, we’re gonna spend time creating a deficit and losing fat because each of these phases plays a pivotal role in building their ideal physique and it’s not one of those phases that lead to the result. It’s the combination of these and the sequencing of these things that allows us to achieve that body composition without suffering hormonally and physiologically.

So how long you should diet on a fat loss phase is typically, in my opinion, the best route to take is probably gonna be anywhere between 10 to 16 weeks. This is a period of time where you can create a big amount of loss. You can kind of create some damage, do some damage on your body fat, really lose some good amount of weight, but it’s not too long to where you’re really starting to adapt negatively from a hormonal and a metabolic standpoint. This is a period of time that’s short enough to where we’re not gonna see a ton of muscle loss. We’re not gonna see a ton of metabolic adaptation, and we can still get a lot of work done towards our fat loss goal.

However, if we do push towards 12, 14, 16, 18, 24 weeks long, that’s still very acceptable and in many cases we should be doing that. This is when you should be implementing diet breaks.If you are not a competitor and you have a lifestyle based plan, and you have a lifelong journey of getting as lean as possible, you should probably be focusing on sustained losses over the course of six plus months. When you go the slower route, it is going to lead to more sustainable weight loss, because the weight loss is slower. When we chase slower weight loss meaning let’s say 0.5 to 1% of body weight per week instead of one to 2% of body weight per week, when we chase that slower rate, our body is more easily able to adapt along the way in a positive manner.

What I mean by that? Your body’s settling point is the point where your body basically gets used to, and comfortable and tries to normalize around its weight, right? So we have to reset our selling point every time we reach a goal. Because if we do not, our body’s gonna jump right back to the old settling weight, which is not where we want to be obviously, if we started a fat loss phase. So by going at this at a much slower rate, our body can adapt to a new settling point more frequently because we’re going slower. So it gives it more time to adjust to the new weight changes that we are seeing along the way.

However, my last little caveat or point with this, while we are chasing this fat loss and while we are on a six plus month journey towards the leanest body we can achieve, it is very important to implement multi-day, refeed. So let’s say two refeed days per week, or every other week, or taking a diet break every four to eight weeks, which I know is a big gap, but they’re all dependent on the size of the deficit you’re creating.

But the point is, is you should be taking these time periods, whether it’s two days or seven days in a row to stay at maintenance calories by bringing your carbs up, so that your body can adapt and your hormones can more safely adjust along the way.

It depends. This is another, it depends question. The amount of calories you should cut in order to initiate the first signs over the first progressions of weight loss or fat loss is really dependent on your dieting history. Everybody is gonna be different and depending on how resilient your body is or how stubborn your body is, we’re gonna have to get more or less aggressive. There’s a many individuals who we can cut 5% of their calories, which is ideal. That’s the minimal effective dose. If we can cut 5% of your calories, that means we can take a small amount. Let’s say we cut a 100 to 150 calories, right? Very small amount. We cut that little bit and boom, we start seeing fat loss. We start seeing weight loss on a weekly basis progression.

Other people, we cut a 100 to 150, nothing happens. So two weeks pass, we cut another 100 to 150 calories, nothing happens again. Then we cut another a 100 to 150 and finally we see fat loss. But it took us getting to a 4 to 500 calorie deficit, over the course of three to five weeks to finally start seeing progress, which is very frustrating. And you spend three to five weeks going into a deficit, possibly suffering your performance, which is gonna make muscle maintenance and hormonal maintenance harder for nothing, because you didn’t lose any weight in that process. And your main goal is fat loss at that time. So for some individuals it is important to take a more aggressive approach.

This approach is going to be right to 500 calories, right to a 15 to 20% deficit right out the gate. That person is gonna need to take more frequent diet breaks and refeeds simply because they’re going into a bigger deficit. It’s less sustainable, but that’s what that person needs in order to see progress, other people can take smaller percentages. This is ideal. We take a smaller percentage of calories. It’s much easier to maintain muscle mass performance hormones and just sustain the diet in general and we can stay consistent with it for a longer period of time, which means every week we’re just gonna chip away at fat loss very easily, and have to take less diet breaks, which means we can stay engaged in the deficit for longer.

So how many calories you should pull to initiate fat loss depends on many things. If you’ve dieted for a long time in the past, if you have more muscle mass on your body, what your training looked like? How much fat you have to actually lose. There’s so many factors that are dependent on, and there’s no way for me to answer this in a video or in a podcast because at the end of the day it’s all dependent on you and so many other factors. What I would do, if you have no idea, is take 5% of your calories and drop them, 5 to 10%.

If you see zero change from that, and I would take these calories from carbs or fat, if you see zero change for that, you might have a more “resilient or stubborn body.” And if you have a history of being that way, then you know it’s probably gonna be that sense. But there’s no way for you to determine until you can really just go try this out, because there’s no science or studies that have proven the stubbornness of somebody’s body or caloric threshold as I would call it. And there’s many cases where people just have this threshold.

Let’s say it’s 1800 calories, you reverse diet your calories up to 2,600 and have no problem, but you keep chipping away at them until you hit 18 and then you finally start seeing results, when in reality you should have just cut to 18 week one. That’s a huge deficit, but you’re gonna guarantee fat loss right out the gates. You can get out of that deficit quicker, which is gonna be more healthy for your hormones and for your performance, and for your muscle maintenance in the long run. So how many calories you should cut to initiate weight loss or fat loss is really dependent on so many factors.

But the best way to determine this is basically to start with the minimal effective dose. And if nothing happens at all after two weeks, you’re probably one of the people that needs to take a more aggressive approach. However, I would probably give it four weeks with two adjustments of 5 to 10% each adjustment from a calorie drop, to see if anything starts. And if nothing starts, you might be a stubborn person and you might have to take a more aggressive approach.

So we’re going to break this up into two quick answers. So the purpose of a refeed and then the purpose of a diet break. The purpose of a refeed is simple. A refeed day is going to be one day where it’s kind of like a cheat meal. So more than anything, it’s just a psychological break from dieting. 24 hours of increased calories, meaning you can have one, I like to use the word free meal or reward meal better than cheat meal because I don’t think you’re cheating on anything at this point. Cheating implies that it’s negative or something bad or you’re failing. That’s not the case here.

If you take one free meal, you’re probably gonna pump your calories up quite a bit, and it ends up being a refeed day because you hit your daily caloric intake at a higher amount. That’s the purpose of a refeed day. So a single day, refeed day serves two main purposes. Number one, it’s a psychological break from the diet. And number two, it’s a glycogen replenishment day. This is basically a day where we have more carbohydrates. We can feel our muscle glycogen a little bit more. We’re probably gonna recover little bit better, probably gonna get a better pump for the next few days in the gym, and we’re probably gonna have some better performance, possibly hit some PRs.

During the diet, this is important. It just gives us a mental break and it allows us to adhere to the diet for a longer period of time, and in a good fat loss structure that refeed day is included in that individual’s weekly caloric intake, which means that even with that higher calorie day, their weekly caloric total balance is still in a deficit, so they’re still gonna lead to fat loss results even with that higher calorie day. That’s the purpose of a refeed day. A diet break is when we take that refeed and we make it more than one day, so at least two days is what I would consider a diet break. Usually that’s called just a multi day refeed. But we’re gonna call it a diet break in this sense.

A diet break is 2 to 14 days. So you can do two days, three days, four days, a full week, two four weeks depending on the person, depending on how long they’ve been dieting. But this is a period of time where we bring calories up to maintenance level. Our new maintenance I might add because as we diet and our metabolism adapts, that maintenance lowers. So you might not wanna go to your maintenance calories from 12 weeks ago when you started the diet. You probably wanna estimate what your caloric maintenance is right now after being in the diet for 12 weeks and start there.

But a diet break is basically where we bring our calories up via carbohydrates. The reason we bring them up via carbohydrates is because A, it helps replenish that muscle glycogen that I just spoke of a little bit better. Obviously, fats are not gonna get stored as muscle glycogen and B, they are less likely to store as fat. There’s a lot of science and studies that show, I mean fat is fat, so it’s easier to get stored as fat. It doesn’t mean all fat gets stored as fat, because there’s a lot of hormonal and neurological processes that the body needs fat to fuel. However, if we have an excess amount of calories and it’s depending on whether we store carbs or fat as body fat, your body’s gonna take fat and store that as fat. It just is easier to do so for it. It’s more efficient, it’s a faster process, so it’s gonna do that more likely.

Carbohydrates on the other hand, are more likely to get stored as muscle glycogen because we can use that for performance later on, and the brain’s first and primary fuel source is glucose, that’s carbohydrates. It’s not ketones, like all these ketone supplements might make you believe, that only happens when we completely deplete our system of carbohydrates, aka Glucose. So when the brain has nothing left to take from, for fuel, it will then take fat and make ketones out of there for fuel. But in any other scenario, it’s going to take glucose, which is carbohydrates.

So a diet break is a day. Back to the whole point here. Diet break is a day where we bring up calories via carbohydrates in order to basically have a hormonal insurance and policy is the way I like to look it. It’s kind of like our safety net. We bring our calories up to maintenance, that’s gonna facilitate Ghrelin, Leptin, metabolism, testosterone, thyroid, all these different hormones that do get depleted, and actually start to decline and diminish as we go further and further into a deficit as far as the timeline goes. So the longer we’re in a deficit, the more our hormones start to take a hit. When we take a diet break, which is a minimum of 48 hours, and this has been documented in studies, basically showing at least 48 hours of at maintenance calories, is needed to elicit change within these hormones.

So that one day refeed the reason I said it’s only there for muscle glycogen and psychological benefit or stress relief, is simply because it’s not long enough to elicit changes within our hormonal profile. Therefore, we need at least 48 hours. Now if you’ve been dieting 12 weeks straight, we’re probably gonna take seven full days, because the longer we stay at maintenance, the more likely we are going to replenish all of our muscle glycogen, fuel better recovery, and actually eliminate these stressed out hormones, and let them adapt in a positive way.

So the difference between a refeed and a diet break is simple. A refeed day is one day, and the main benefits are muscle glycogen and psychological benefit. And a diet break is at least 48 hours, two days, but all the way up to 14 days, depending on how long you’ve been in deficit. And the main purpose there is to replenish hormones to fuel performance, to make sure that we’re resetting or readapting our metabolism in a positive way. The way you know what to choose for you personally, is basically on the length of your diet.

If you’re jumping into a diet tomorrow and you’ve been in it for seven days, you don’t need a diet break. You haven’t stressed the body for long enough. For you, you probably just need one refeed day. So if you’re going into this diet phase, the best thing for you to do is to actually just have one refeed day per week as a mental break and as a muscle glycogen replenishment. If you plan on doing this for the long run, and if that’ll help you adhere to it. Some people do better without a refeed day and that’s totally fine because if fat loss is your main goal, we just need to attack a deficit and that’s really all that matters here.

But in the cases that you’ve been dieting for four plus weeks, you might want to integrate a diet break every once in a while. If you’re very focused on muscle presser variants, hormonal balance and strength and performance, you might wanna add in a diet break every fourth or fifth week. So you have three or four weeks of hard dieting and then you have one week of just relaxing and bringing calories up via carbohydrates. And that’s basically how you determine which is better for you between a refeed and a diet break. That’s a big last question guys, this might be two podcasts. I don’t know why I tried to tell you guys I’m gonna do this rapid fire style and get through these quick, because let’s be honest, that never happens, but I love it

So hypertrophy is muscle gain, and the question is simple. How many calories do you need to eat over maintenance in order to elicit true hypertrophy or true muscle gain? Right? So as we know based on the very first question I answered in this entire and nutrition FAQ, we need to create a caloric balance that is positive net. Which means we’re consuming more calories than we are burning and when we do that we gain weight. If we are training for muscle gain, we are training on a high volume, hypertrophy based program, that weight gain is predominantly going to be muscle.

However, if we just uncontrollably eat more than maintenance, we’re going to gain some fat in the process of that, and I might add that if you’re serious about building muscle, then you’re gonna have to gain some fat as well, that’s part of the process, it just happens. In fact, when, and this has been studied and shown in different research, when you add a little bit fat in the process, you’re probably more likely to gain a little bit more muscle faster, than you were if you were trying to go too slow and stay as lean as possible during the process. Don’t get me wrong, in a perfect world and with some genetic freaks, we can stay very lean while we try to gain muscle. None of us want to gain fat intentionally, but if we allow ourselves to gain a little bit of fat in the process of building muscle, we are going to build more muscle faster and that’s the real goal at the end of the time.

It’s easier to cut fat than it is build muscle. So cut fat later on down the road. Keep the goal, the goal, and focus on hypertrophy. Now that being said, how many calories should you increase over maintenance in order to build more muscle and gain more weight? The first and foremost thing that you need to understand is what I just said. You need to find your maintenance first. So the best way to do this is to track your calories for 7 to 14 days. Take the average caloric intake and if your weight has been averaged out and is maintained over the last one to two weeks, take your average calories and that’s your maintenance calories. It’s the most accurate way to do this.

We can use calculators, but sometimes those calculators are inaccurate or based on the most ideal situation. And the reality is a lot of us have stressors in our life that lower our total daily energy expenditure and they lower our metabolic maintenance, our chloric maintenance. Therefore, tracking, taking average of your weight and your calories is probably the most accurate way to actually understand where your maintenance calories are. From here you can add calories and it all depends on if you are a novice, intermediate or an advanced lifter.

If you are a novice, a newbie, somebody who has never trained before and has just started getting into this and you’re looking to gain muscle build size, the best thing for you to do is to actually add quite a bit of calories. Make sure you’re hitting your bodyweight in protein. I would say hit about half your body weight in fats, and then add the rest of calories and you should probably be in a minimum 250 calorie, but all the way up to a 750 calorie surplus. Start slow, track your body weight. Again, we don’t want to purposefully or unintentionally gain body fat because if we do that does a lot of negatives to our hormones, and to our metabolism and to our insulin sensitivity, our P ratio, basically our health and our ability to actually gain muscle.

So if we purposely gain a ton of fat, because we’re in such a hurry to get big, we are going to diminish our potential to gain as much muscle as possible. So we don’t want to do that. What we want to do is start slow. So start with the minimum effective dose and as a newbie, that’s probably about 200 to 250 calories. Add that above maintenance via carbohydrates, and then slowly add as you track. So if you go two weeks and your weight has not jumped up at all, that’s when you would add another 100 calories and you keep doing that until your weight starts climbing up. Usually you will find that sweet spot. It’s not one of those things where you need to add calories after week, after week, after week, in order to keep seeing changes.

Find your maintenance, add 250 calories if you start to gain, let it ride until you literally stop gaining, and then add a 100 calories to that. Keep doing this process over the course of six to eight months because it takes a long time to gain muscle until you completely plateau or you’ve gained a good amount of body fat and it’s time for a mini cut. And at this point we pull calories back for four to six weeks, dive heart into a deficit, not long enough to lose muscle mass, but long enough to create body fat loss and then improve our insulin sensitivity, improve our health, improve our hormones, and improve our P ratio and just like what we see in the mirror a little bit more, and then you get back to that muscle gain phase.

So for a newbie start at 250 but for some people that are genetic freaks or just metabolic machines, sometimes it goes all the way up to 600, 700 calories over maintenance. For an intermediate, we’re going to start even slower, probably around 150 so not much less. But the difference here is the scale is less. So you might start around that 150 to 200 mark, and it’s all dependent on your genetics, your personal traits, your environment, your training, your sleep, your stress, your so on and so forth. And your genetic potential mainly, start it at 150 200 calorie mark and then from there slowly increase calories much slower by adding about 50 calories per week until you start actually gaining, because it’s less likely for you to build as much muscle as rapidly.

And last but not least, advanced lifters, you’re going to gain even less muscle. I’m talking if you gain a half a pound of muscle per month, you are actually doing pretty good. Now you might want to attack one pound, 1.5 pounds per month because you are going against the fat in the process. But still as an advanced lifter, we have to understand that muscle is not going to build as quickly and therefore we have to be patient with this process. So for the advanced lifter, I usually like increasing calories by like 50 do a 100 over maintenance, tracking for two to three weeks. And seeing if we have some very slow but steady progress, and that usually looks like half a pound to a pound. Actually a sorry, one quarter of a pound to a half a pound per week.

Yes, you might only gain a half a pound per month and that’s okay. But as an advanced lifter, you’re probably gonna add 50 to a 100 calories over maintenance, and then you can adjust that as you go. Now there’s multiple ways to do this. Like I said, that’s the slow route and that’s the more accurate route. It will take more time, but there is some merit to adding a little bit more, a little bit faster, and allowing yourself to get a little bit fatter in the process. It’s all up to you and dependent on if you can handle gaining some body fat in the mirror. It really does come down to that.

Yes, there absolutely is. The only time you’ll ever do this is when either A, you’re getting over a certain body weight that does not allow you to perform at your sport at as high of a level as you would like. Or if you literally can’t make weight because you’re getting too big, in those scenarios, you will implement a mini cut. The second scenario is if you were focused on hypertrophy and building muscle, and you’ve been gaining for a good amount of time, at least three months, so at least 12 weeks, because you do need to spend time in a surplus and actually pushing hypertrophy to see results. If you’ve done that for a while and you’ve put on too much fat in the process, or you’ve just put enough fat on to want to pull back for a little bit, spend anywhere between, and literally only two weeks for some people, anywhere between two to six weeks doing a mini cut.

This is where we’re going to create a pretty hefty deficit, between let’s say 20 to 35% of where you were at during your surplus and your gains. So it’s a pretty big deficit. You’re gonna lower training volume, so you’re gonna kinda de load your training focus more on strength, focus more low volume stuff, skill works, so on and so forth. And then you are going to allow yourself to lose some body fat, loosen body weight. Get yourself back to a leaner point where you feel more confident in the mirror, you feel more comfortable in your body. But then also again, like I mentioned in the previous question, you’re also going to increase your P ratio, which is literally your body’s ability to partition nutrients for muscle growth versus fat storage.

You’re gonna improve your insulin sensitivity, which allows you to use carbohydrates better. You’re gonna improve your confidence, your energy, your cardiovascular, health, which is gonna improve your recovery time between sets. You’re just gonna feel better. So I would say every 12 weeks, every 12 to 24 weeks on a mass gaining diet, you’re gonna want to do a mini cut just to improve health and keep herself lean enough to continue gaining good weight in the future, or B, if you’re an athletic trainee and you need to cut weight in order to stay in your weight class or to perform at your best for your sport.

Many reasons. The first reason is because protein is one of the most important nutrients we can consume on our body. We quite literally need it, it’s an essential nutrient so we can’t survive without it. It repairs all the tissues in our body. The other reason is because it costs more to consume and what I mean by that is the thermic effect of food, the TEF is higher. What this means is we actually burn more calories by digesting protein by a long slide, than any other nutrient we consume, more so than fat or carbs.

This means we’re just gonna burn more calories by consuming high protein. This is gonna be advantageous for burning calories for fat loss. Another reason it’s one of the most satiating nutrients. Actually, it is the most satiating nutrient, which means that we’re actually going to feel more full and satisfied by consuming protein on a regular basis. So why wouldn’t we want … on a diet, why wouldn’t we want to have high protein? It keeps us satiated. And one of the biggest keys or one of the biggest reasons people fall off their diet is because they’re constantly having cravings and they’re constantly hungry, which is a normal thing when dieting, but the reality is if we can avoid that, we should.

Another reason, having protein at the minimum if not extra, protein in each day. So let’s say the minimum being like 0.8 grams, having more than that, like one to 1.2 grams per pound, during a caloric deficit has been shown to maintain more muscle mass during fat loss. And if we’re trying to lose fat and we’re going into a deficit so we can lose weight, one of our highest priority is not only for making our physique look good, keeping performance high, but also just to keep health in check, is to make sure that we have enough of muscle tissue on our body.

One of the best ways to do that, keep your protein really high. So there’s a lot of reasons we keep protein high, but it really is one of the most important nutrients when it comes to fat loss. And therefore you’ll never find a diet that works great for fat loss that isn’t high fat. Even the ketogenic diet, if you look at it, there’s plenty of arguments with the ketogenic diet and it would be arguably the only plan that allows you to eat low protein and still lose weight. And there’s a few reasons for that and, I don’t even completely agree with that diet for fat loss, but, that’s besides the point, that’s a different question. The point with this is simple. The most effective fat loss diets all have high protein and it’s for all those reasons I listed.

That’s tough. I would say protein, and it all depends on the type of training. So let’s go through a couple scenarios here. If you are just doing cardio, protein is gonna be the most important nutrient. You really didn’t burn that much glycogen, you didn’t really increase cortisol that much, and, it was just kind of an easy cardio session, especially if it’s LISS cardio, you’re probably just gonna wanna have protein.

Protein is shown to be one of the most important nutrients to have in each meal. And the main thing is less about post workout and more about daily consumption and having protein at each meal. So your muscle protein synthesis response is constantly elevated. That’s the big kicker here that we want to focus on. But I would say protein is more important for most workouts, because most workouts aren’t depleting glycogen for us to really rush to a post workout meal and worry about carbs. However, there’s two scenarios that we want to prioritize carbs or at least include carbs.

I don’t think you should ever leave out protein from your post workout meal and therefore I do think it’s more important than carbs post workout in most scenarios because we are trying to make sure that we recover, and don’t break down muscle tissue in the negative. Now the two situations where this might change. Number one, if your goal is hypertrophy, there’s actually three scenarios. Number one, if your goal is hypertrophy and you want to build as much muscle as possible, we need an insulin spike. We need that surge of insulin. We also need more carbohydrates to store as muscle glycogen to help rebuild tissue and actually perform muscle growth in our body.

Carbs are pretty damn important for muscle growth period. So we might want to have it post workout number one, just to get our total carb intake up. And number two because our insulin sensitivity is higher around training and what this means is that during that post workout window, our body is more likely to take those carbohydrates and store them as muscle glycogen and as new tissues rather than storing them as fat. The second scenario during fat loss, because this post workout window leaves you more insulin sensitive, you’re probably gonna better utilize those carbohydrates. It’s not that you absolutely need them during that time, it’s just that they might be more beneficial during that time compared to right before bed or early in the morning or at a random time of the day.

Around training is gonna be more advantageous because you’re just gonna use those carbs better, so why not have them there at that post workout window? The third scenario, a very high intense athlete or training somebody like a crossfitter, you are doing such high and adrenal fatiguing training, you’re really pushing yourself hard. You’re driving into that sympathetic nervous system so hard that we need to spike insulin because it has an inverse relationship with cortisol. And when we do so we bring cortisol down, it blunts that cortisol response and allows us to distress faster, recover faster, and get into that parasympathetic mode a little bit faster.

So in that scenario, it’s pretty damn important to have carbohydrates because those carbohydrates are gonna lower cortisol and allow us to start recovering just a bit faster. So for the intense individual, it’s less about muscle glycogen and it’s more about cortisol management.

There’s kind of like a hierarchy here. So step number one, is definitely daily intake. That’s the most important thing. You’re gonna get the most bang for your buck out of just focusing on daily intake. And if your daily intake is in check, you’re probably gonna be okay. That’s the most important thing we want to focus on here. But pre-workout nutrition can matter for a few different reasons. Number one, if you are a glycogen depleted or if you are in a deficit, or if you are a very lean carbohydrates, some of them, especially fast acting ones, will start to absorb and give you that insulin response that allows you to train a little bit harder, get a better pump, fuel your muscles with water, sodium, carbohydrates have more muscle glycogen, and you’re just gonna have more energy.

Carbs are quite literally energy. Not all those carbohydrates gonna be absorbed and digested for energy right away, and that’s why daily intake is definitely more important. Oftentimes in most people’s digestive system, it takes longer than a couple hours to digest a meal and utilize it for fuel. However, some of those nutrients may be used for fuel in that session. But for the most of us, the most important thing is daily intake simply because what I eat right now, will not be ready to use in an hour or two. It’s gonna take much longer to go through the bile, the breakdown, the digestion, the absorption, and then the muscle glycogen, so actually glycolysis, like actually taking nutrients and producing glucose and fuel with them. It just takes a little bit longer and therefore pre-workout nutrition probably matters a lot less than daily intake.

The other thing we have to remember here, is that we don’t want a lot of food bogged down or making us feel full, focused on digestion, bringing blood flow into the gut instead of the limbs, et cetera. What we want here is a food, that is light and easy to digest, that’s mainly protein and carbohydrates because those two things are going to supply us with the recovery agents and the fuel agents we need to perform better and recover from what we’re doing at that moment. So all in all pre-workout nutrition does matter, but it comes after daily intake, and use it in that system, meaning hit your daily intake first, that’s level one most important thing, and after you lock your daily intake in, then you can start messing with nutrient timing and focusing on pre-workout nutrition.

What I will say is I do believe that pre-workout nutrition is more important than post-workout nutrition. The reason for this is what you eat before is going to, whether it’s placebo or not, it is going to affect how you train. It is absolutely going to affect how you feel during that training session. And that matters a lot because the better you feel, the better you perform, the heavier weights, the better your results are going to be.

Number two because this process of breaking down protein into amino acids to go into our bloodstream and breaking down carbohydrates by digesting, absorbing, turning them into glycogen and fueling our muscles and replenishing our glycogen stores, those processes do take time, it’s not immediate, and therefore what you eat right before your workout is probably still going to be digesting and being absorbed post-workout. So therefore your pre-workout is kind of your post-workout as well. And because of that, I do think that pre-workout nutrition does matter and is actually more important than post-workout nutrition.

Yes and no. The reason I say yes and no, is because when we’re tracking nutrition and we’re trying to stay dialed in, restaurants are typically the least accurate types of meals that we can consume because we are not in control of the measurements being done. What I mean by that is we can’t really determine if when we go to Chipotle, for example, if we’re actually getting four ounces of chicken, or if we are actually getting one tablespoon of sour cream or guacamole or one fourth cup of cheese.

There’s really no way of telling and it’s very random. My advice to clients is to not remove eating out, just make sure that you’re planning ahead and tracking. At the end of the day, macros are just a great estimate. They’re the best estimate that we can possibly use as a tool, but you should not eliminate all your social outings, all your restaurant eating, all your flexibility just because you’re tracking and that will create less adherence total long-term. We don’t want to do that.

So the best thing to do is keep food eating out, like let that be a thing. Make sure you plan ahead, try to get the best results you can with eating out, and if your weight is not being lost, if you’re not seeing fat loss, if you’re not seeing progress at that point, we can start removing eating out as often because it probably is not because the food is a bad choice, or because calories in versus calories out isn’t an effective strategy, but because what you are tracking in MyFitnessPal, probably isn’t as accurate as what you’re eating out.

Add to that, if you’re not even tracking macros or in MyFitnessPal, you’re really shooting in the dark and you’re not really knowing what’s being consumed. So if you’re eating out and you’re losing weight, good, keep going. If you stop losing weight, before you cut more calories, remove some of the meals out at restaurants, for meals at home so you can be in better control and have more accurate measurements of the food you’re consuming, and at that point you should start seeing weight loss better. It’s technically because you cut calories, but not because you lowered the number of consumption. It’s because you’ve become more accurate with what you are tracking and that led to cutting calories, really getting you back to where you’re supposed to be in the first place.

But for most clients, I still recommend eating out once a week just because I think it’s good to be social, to go out, to be flexible, to learn how to track on the go because that’s a lifelong habit and self awareness tool that you can use and practice with for your nutrition in the long run. And I think it’s really important to still enjoy your diet. So for most people, I do think you should eat out. In an ideal world, you’re probably eating out only once, maybe twice a week. If you’re really serious about your fat loss.

I think that this is overdrawn in many cases. We don’t need to be consuming two gallons a day of water, for example. And it’s all kind of relevant to your body weight. You should be peeing semi clear. You don’t want your wallet, your pee to be completely clear and you don’t want it to be dark yellow. It should be somewhere in between that. It’s supposed to be yellow, but it doesn’t want to be dark and stinky. You also don’t want it to be completely clear. The best way to do this is to measure by P. Everybody’s water intake’s gonna be different.

I could tell you that you should drink half your body weight in fluid ounces, and you should drink about three fourths of your body weight in fluid ounces if you’re active, and that’s a good measurement. However, if your pee is super clear at that point, it’s probably too much water. If you’re drinking that much and your pee is still very dark, it’s probably not enough water. And the reason this changes because everybody has different sweat glands. Everybody has different hormones, everybody has different genetics, everybody has different active lifestyles.

So it really, really depends on all that. It depends on the food you’re eating as well. If you have a higher sodium diet, and a higher carbohydrate diet, you’re probably going to need more water as to oppose to somebody who isn’t consuming as much sodium, isn’t training as much or has a lower carb diet. So the best way to do it is drink one half to three fourths of your body weight in fluid ounces of water per day, and measure by how clear your pee is. If your pee is crystal clear, you’re drinking too much. If it is dark yellow and stinks, you’re drinking too little.

I answered this question a little bit earlier when talking about something. I think diet breaks. Yes it does technically. Now what matters most is calories in versus calories out. So, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a high fat diet. You can have a very high fat diet, and you can be very lean. And this has been shown in ketogenic and Atkins style diet. In fact, Atkins worked really well for a lot of people. I like Atkins better than a keto in most senses because it gives you a high protein too.

But the point is, if calories are equated, you’re not going to have an issue. What that means is if you have your calories at maintenance, you can have your fat super high and your carbs super low, you’re not gonna gain any fat. You can flip that and have your carbs super high and you’re fat really low, you’re also not gonna gain fat. You’re at maintenance calories, you’re at a calorie intake that is going to allow you to maintain your weight quite literally. Therefore, the macro ratios don’t really matter.

Where this changes is in some cases, like for example, women who have PCOS may be more insulin resistance. In that situation, they may have more favorable outcomes by consuming higher fat, lower carbs. So if they went maintenance calories, higher carb, lower fat, they might actually gain some fat, because their body doesn’t know how to handle those carbohydrates as well and they probably wouldn’t feel as good. So there are certain scenarios where these macros change even at maintenance. But for the most part, calories in versus calories out is all that matters.

Now, once we go into a hyper caloric diet, so we are actually going to eat more calories than we need to maintain our weight, meaning we are in a caloric surplus. Let’s say we’re trying to gain muscle. You don’t want to do this by adding a bunch of fat in your diet because fat is going to store as body fat easier once you are in a surplus. It doesn’t need much explanation here. It’s pretty obvious fat as fat, it’s easier to do so. It doesn’t need to completely change. When we look at what the body does in order to change carbohydrates into stored body fat, it has to go through a difficult process compared to what it needs to do in order to change lipids that we consume via fat, through food, into body fat on our body. That’s a very easy transition to make, because it’s not much of a transition at all.

When we are in a surplus trying to build muscle, it’s gonna be more advantageous if we have fats moderate to low and we increase our calories over maintenance via carbohydrates because those carbs are gonna more likely be stored as muscle glycogen, which is gonna allow us to perform harder and build more muscle tissue. So in some scenarios fat is easier to store as body fat. And for that reason, and a few other reasons, I actually prefer moderate to high carb diets with a lot of our clients because one, most people love carbs, two, it allows you to maintain performance and muscle mass during a fat loss diet, and three, it’s probably gonna be less likely to store as body fat. So there’s a lot of reasons why carbs are great, and yes, that can store in your body a little bit easier than carbohydrates if you were in a surplus. But we have to highlight that point, if you were in a surplus.

So as I just said, this is very personal preference. If we’re going into a deficit, there’s two things we’re gonna look at here. Number one, what do you prefer, and what does your body prefer too? So if you crave fats all the time and you don’t really like eating carbs ’cause you feel like they make you bloated, you don’t enjoy those types of foods, then you should probably be on a higher fat, lower carb diet. It’s probably gonna work better for you because you can adhere better and that’s what’s most important. Your adherence long term.

If you are on a fat loss diet and your goal is to maintain as much muscle as possible, I’m gonna have you on a higher carb, lower fat diet. This is typically why most bodybuilders and physique athletes follow a high carb, low fat diet. The reason is simple. It allows you to maintain performance and muscle mass, a hell of a lot easier than a high fat diet does on a deficit. And this has been proven anecdotally and in research. And there’s a lot of great strength coaches and nutritionists out there that promote this route for people who want to get lean and stay as muscular as possible.

So in most scenarios I will recommend that, if your goal is to lose as much fat as possible while maintaining as much strength and performance and muscle mass as possible, you’re gonna wanna follow a high carb low to moderate fat diet. If your goal is pure fat loss, you are more sedentary than you are active. Meaning you don’t train super hard or super frequently, and, you possibly have some autoimmune or hormone related issues. You might be in a situation where a higher fat, lower carb diet is advantageous, especially if you are a sedentary individual. You’re just not gonna be using those carbs as fuel. So it makes more sense to give your body fats as fuel during that deficit. And at the end of the day, the deficit is what’s creating that fat loss. So it really depends and it depends a lot on your intensity levels and your training output.

You should be eating as many meals as you personally can adhere to best. The reason I say that is because there has been studies that have shown one meal, two meals, three meals for meals, five meals all the way up to like 17 meals, believe it or not, like a lot of meals, maybe it wasn’t 17, maybe it was 7. 17 is pretty dramatic. I think it was seven meals, but from one to seven and all of the calories were equated, because calories were equated the results didn’t differ person to person.

So what this study showed us, is it actually doesn’t matter how many meals you eat per day, as long as macros and calories are equated and in check. So if we individualize your calories and your macros, I don’t care if you eat three meals for meals, five meals, it doesn’t matter. The caveats here, number one, if you eat six or seven meals a day, it can be very hard to adhere to. You can feel consumed by food. You feel like you’re constantly prepping. And you’re not really getting any advantages because you don’t get more muscle protein synthesis from six meals versus four meals. You don’t have a faster metabolism because it’s all about calories at that point, and you’re not gonna see better results.

So after 30 days, you’re probably so burnt out from this diet that you’re gonna fall off. Therefore, I don’t think six meals is usually the route to take with people. For people who eat two or three meals a day, oftentimes you have more cravings because you have these big meals, or you’re not eating enough calories because it’s hard to get all your calories and two or three meals. So I have found that the sweet spot tends to be four or five meals per day. I also believe that this is more advantageous for strength and performance or muscle gain athletes.

The reason I find this more advantageous for strength and performance based athletes is simply because you’re giving your body more fuel. Like when we give our body fuel, it’s easier to form our energy is higher, and we’re gonna feel more recovered. And also usually when performance or muscle gain is our goal, we need to be at minimum at maintenance, but usually in a surplus so it’s harder to consume all your calories in two or three meals a day. I usually find that the four to five meals per day is really the sweet spot, but again, it all depends on adherence. So if you can hit your calories, you can adhere and you feel better on two meals per day, that’s what you should do. If you’re used to eating six meals a day and that’s what you like and that’s what you feel best on, then that’s what you should do.

I think a ketogenic diet can improve body composition, if you follow it long enough. Typically you’re not gonna start feeling great or seeing significant body composition changes for a while, and this is why they call it the keto flu. For the first two to three weeks, you feel like shit, your body has no glucose, your body is not taking in a lot of different nutrients, and it’s hard for your body to adjust from using glucose as a fuel to ketones, which is produced from fat. And that’s a process in and of itself. So it takes time for your body to start turning fat into ketones, to allow your body to have the right fuel it needs. And because of that it can be hard.

Usually what we see is we see a big drop in weight weeks, like one, and two, because you lose a lot of water weight basically, from not having carbohydrates, then you plateau for a few weeks until your body really starts to shift into ketosis, which can take anywhere between four or sorry, like three, usually like three weeks minimum is what I’ve seen all the way up to three months. I’ve even heard people talk about like sometimes it takes people a long time to truly get into ketosis where they start thriving and feeling great.

So you kind of go through this phase, where you cut a bunch of water, you go through keto flu, and then you finally start seeing results. And like I said, it can happen in three weeks. You finally start feeling good. At that point we can see body composition changes, favorable for fat loss, not muscle gain. It has been documented study, after study, after study, that performance and muscle gain is much harder and very rare with ketogenic diets. They’ve done this in crossfitters, they’ve done this in endurance athletes, they’ve done this in I believe rugby players. They’ve done this in, not necessarily bodybuilders but people purposely trying to build muscles. So not necessarily competitive bodybuilders I should say.

But, they’ve done these ketogenic studies on these people and they’ve even shown in studies that even in a calorie surplus they didn’t gain any muscle while on a ketogenic diet, versus a calorie surplus on a carbohydrate based diet is gonna lead to more favorable performance and muscle hypertrophy. So in my opinion, it’s not the best thing for performance in body composition. It’s very rare to find somebody who thrives and feels better on a ketogenic diet performance wise. I can almost guarantee they’re not gonna build more muscle than somebody who’s on carbohydrates.

The only scenario I can see relevant for people really thriving performance and strength wise on a ketogenic diet, is when they possibly have some food intolerances, some autoimmune related issues or just some gut issues that are not allowing their body to process, digest and absorb carbohydrates properly. When that happens, they’re just not getting what they need to get out of carbs so their body feels way better when they start taking them out in producing ketones instead. But for the most part, for 99% of people, I don’t think a ketogenic diet is best for body composition, especially not performance or building muscle. When it comes to fat loss, you can achieve good fat loss and body composition results. You can get really lean on a ketogenic diet for a couple of reasons.

Number one, if your insulin is resistant, it can allow you to reset your insulin sensitivity, which should be a temporary thing ’cause you should move back to a balanced diet after that. But even if you continue a ketogenic diet, improving that insulin sensitivity can help body composition changes, and then the other scenario that this works is just because you created a chloric deficit. If you go to into a ketogenic diet and you’re in a calorie deficit, you’re gonna see results. So it doesn’t matter if you’re paleo, keto, intermittent fasting, you’re following macros, it’s balanced zone, it’s high carb, doesn’t matter. Calorie deficit is what’s gonna produce body composition changes as far as fat loss goes.

The one difference we see in fat loss results is that it is easier and more likely to maintain performance and muscle tissue, lean muscle tissue, so actual muscle mass, in your body if you consume a diet that is higher in carbs versus a ketogenic diet while in a deficit.

That’s a really good question. So macros are macronutrients. Micros are micronutrients. One reason they are listed after is because one is measured in a larger sense than the other. Macronutrients are just bigger right they’re macro. So they’re measured in grams versus micronutrients are pretty much always measured in milligrams. Now, the main reason for this is because, calories and then macros, those are the two things that are gonna determine most body composition changes.

And whether, we’ve tried to debunk this or not a million times, whether we’ve tried to believe the other way around, whether we really want whole foods and like paleo and these like clean “foods” to be healthy for us and help improve our life more, the reality is, is macros take a bigger role because macros can lead to getting leaner and if you have body fat on your body, I don’t care how clean your eating, you’re gonna have poorer markers of health. So when you go get your blood done and we look at triglycerides, cholesterol, blood sugar levels, hormone panel, all these different things, the reality is, is if you have more fat in your body in less lean muscle tissue, you’re gonna have more poor results on these blood markers and these health markers.

Whereas even if you consume a twinkie every day, which was actually shown in the twinkie study, if you have a twinkie every single day, your calories and macros are equated and you lose body fat and maintain your lean muscle tissue, you’re gonna have better health markers because you have less body fat in your body. So because having body fat on your body, especially in excess amounts is so unhealthy for our hormones, for our health, for our blood levels, all these different things. Because of that, macros come first because they make a bigger effect on your life, and on your health, than micronutrients do.

Now, if you hit your macros every single day, you lose a bunch of way, but you’ve been consuming shitty food with very low micro nutrient density for a long period of time. Eventually you’re going to have nutrient deficiencies and that is going to lead to a whole parameter of health issues. Now you can get away with it for a while, but it will bite you in the ass sooner or later, so it’s not something you wanna ignore. So these two are very close. It’s not like macros tramp micros by a landslide, but the reality is, is it does come before micros because it’s easier to track< it’s more important for total weight loss, and therefore total health. And it’s just again, simpler to look at in the grand scheme of things because it’s a bigger measurement. Micros are a close second though.

Nutritional periodization is the process of planning ahead. If we look at what periodization is, periodization is quite literally just having a plan, and I would add it’s having an intelligent and a structured plan, that is long term. This means that instead of me just saying, “Hey, I’m gonna lose as much weight as I can in 12 weeks,” it means that I know after 12 weeks I’m going to take a two week diet break. Then I’m gonna get back into a fat loss phase because I’m not at my goal yet, but I’m only going to spend another six to nine weeks in that fat loss phase. I’m gonna follow that by four to six weeks of maintenance. Then I’m going to prioritize muscle hypertrophy and I’m actually gonna slowly work into a surplus for 12 weeks.

Follow that by a mini cut, which is gonna allow me to shave off some excess body fat for four to six weeks, so I can improve insulin sensitivity and P ratio to build more muscle in my next 12 week muscle gain phase. After that one, it’s been about eight months. Now I can jump into another fat loss phase that’s long term, so on and so forth. Nutritional periodization is looking at things like that. It’s taking the year and understanding when I’m in fat loss, when I’m in maintenance, when I’m in muscle gain.

It’s also implementing refeeds and diet breaks strategically along the way to facilitate less metabolic adaptation on the downside, the negative and less hormonal adaptation as a whole, testosterone, thyroid, cortisol, so on and so forth. So it’s basically having a very structured, scheduled and well thought out plan for your nutrition for the long term to ensure maximum progress, maximum muscle mass, less fat gain and fat accumulation. So more fat loss and the optimal health measures from a hormonal standpoint for the most part.

There’s no blanket statement here, just like everything in nutrition, but if we had to take all ethical purposes aside, all opinion biases aside, I don’t think it’s arguable that animal protein is better, from a sense of what our body utilizes as tissue recovery. The reality is, is animal protein is more bioavailable, it has higher leucine count, and it has a better amino acid profile and it’s probably going to elicit more tissue recovery, and tissue regrowth compared to plant based protein. Plant based protein just doesn’t have the same amino acid profile.

It’s not gonna be as advantageous for building muscle, and in most scenarios, whether we’re talking about hormones, health markers, fat loss, building muscle strength, we want more muscle tissue in our body. We want something that’s more bioavailable and is going to be more utilized as a protein source. Animal proteins just take the win on that. They take the crown, this has been shown in document, in study time, after time, after time again. So no matter what anybody says, it’s just the reality. Animal protein is probably gonna work better than plant based protein.

The one thing I will say is you can get away with plant based protein. It is not an issue. So if ethically that’s what you choose to do, there’s nothing wrong with that. We work with plenty of clients that choose to be vegetarian, and it absolutely is a route to take or vegan. But, if we have to say what’s the difference and what’s better? Animal protein is gonna be more easily utilized by your body because it is more bioavailable. And the main difference is that animal proteins have a better amino acid profile, meaning they have more leucine in there, which is the dominant precursor for muscle protein synthesis, which is what we want going on in our body every time we eat or train in order to build more muscle.

Short answer: Not the way people think.
Most adults don’t experience a dramatic metabolic “crash” in their 30s or 40s. What usually changes is movement (NEAT) and muscle mass if training drops off. Less movement + less muscle = lower daily calorie burn.

What we do in TCM:
We protect metabolism the right way—lift consistently, hit protein, and keep steps intentional.

Usually no. In fact, larger bodies often burn more calories per day because it takes more energy to maintain and move more tissue.

What’s more common:

• Underestimating intake (especially weekends / bites / drinks)

• Overestimating activity

• NEAT slowly declining over years

• Eating patterns that drive hunger and cravings

TCM approach: We create a plan that fits your life and makes consistency predictable.

Your metabolism isn’t broken — it adapted.
When you diet and lose weight, your body burns fewer calories because:

1. You weigh less (you cost less energy to run)

2. You may move less without noticing (NEAT drops)

3. Hunger increases, making adherence harder

Translation: You didn’t damage anything. You just need a better strategy.

What we do:

• Protein + lifting to protect muscle

• Steps tracked to prevent “silent” movement drop

• Planned maintenance phases when needed to restore performance and consistency

Stress can absolutely make fat loss harder — but mostly through behavior:

• cravings increase

• sleep gets worse

• routine falls apart

• emotional eating creeps in

• activity drops

Not because cortisol “turns off” fat loss. It turns up hunger and reduces consistency. We have 2 full articles on how cortisol, the stress hormone, does and does not impact your fat loss results HERE and HERE.

What we do:
We shift you into a minimum effective plan during high-stress seasons so you keep progress without white-knuckling.

Eating in a deficit will lower calorie burn to some degree. That’s expected. But that’s not the same as “damage.”

The real risk of aggressive cutting is:

• more hunger

• lower training performance

• less daily movement

• higher rebound eating

TCM rule: Choose the biggest deficit you can actually sustain while still training, sleeping, and staying consistent.

You can learn more about this from our Metabolic Adaptation Guide, which was written by a PhD Researcher and is here on the website for free.