2829: Why That Pesky Last 10 Pounds Won't Come Off
125 min
•Apr 4, 202615 days agoSummary
Mind Pump hosts discuss why the last 10 pounds of body fat are stubborn and difficult to lose, explaining the metabolic adaptation that occurs during prolonged calorie deficits. They emphasize that the solution is typically a reverse diet and muscle-building phase rather than further calorie restriction, and take calls from listeners seeking guidance on nutrition, training, and body composition goals.
Insights
- Metabolic adaptation during prolonged dieting causes the body to reduce calorie expenditure through decreased activity, muscle loss, and hormonal changes—making further restriction counterproductive
- The last 10 pounds plateau typically occurs when calorie intake drops below 2000 for women or 2500 for men, signaling the need for a reverse diet rather than additional cuts
- Building muscle through increased calories and strength training is more effective for breaking fat-loss plateaus than increasing cardio and cutting calories further
- Psychological factors like self-imposed pressure, shame, and perfectionism drive binge eating cycles as much as physiological hunger does
- Low-fat, high-protein diets (e.g., 280g protein, 64g fat) impair recovery, sleep, testosterone, and adherence due to poor satiety and palatability
Trends
GLP-1 medications are being misused by people in calorie deficits to further suppress appetite rather than address root metabolic issuesBody composition testing reveals that scale weight loss often masks muscle loss when calorie restriction is too aggressive without strength trainingReverse dieting is becoming standard practice among coaches to reset metabolism and break plateaus, shifting from restriction-based to abundance-based approachesChildhood sports specialization is declining in favor of multi-sport participation and varied movement patterns for better long-term athletic developmentPetrochemical exposure (phthalates, nanoplastics) in everyday products is linked to reproductive health issues and fertility problems, driving demand for cleaner alternativesPlayground safety standards have shifted from wood mulch to recycled tire rubber, introducing chemical exposure concerns despite perceived safety improvementsSocial media platforms (Instagram, YouTube) are being legally recognized as intentionally addictive to children, opening regulatory pathways for tech companiesStrength training is emerging as superior to cardio for skin health due to collagen production benefits from protein synthesis signaling
Topics
Metabolic adaptation and calorie deficit plateausReverse dieting protocols for fat lossProtein intake optimization for body compositionFat intake and hormonal health (testosterone)Binge eating psychology and restriction cyclesGLP-1 medication misuse and appropriate applicationsYouth athletic development and sport specializationStrength training for aesthetic and health outcomesChildhood sports injury prevention and body awarenessPetrochemical exposure and fertilityNanoplastics accumulation in organsPlayground surface safety and chemical toxicitySocial media addiction in childrenCollagen production and skin healthPolice academy fitness preparation
Companies
CarGurus
Pre-roll sponsor providing vehicle pricing and dealer review information for car buyers
Caldera Lab
Skincare products sponsor using biomimetic formulations to mimic natural skin pathways
Ketone IQ
Supplement sponsor offering exogenous ketones to provide mental clarity and energy without dietary carb restriction
Mind Pump (Store)
Host-owned merchandise retailer selling branded apparel, hats, mugs, and training gear
Mind Pump Nutrition Coaching
Host-owned service offering 45-minute nutrition consultation calls with certified coaches for diet planning
Fatty15
Supplement sponsor featuring C15 fatty acid for cellular aging, mitochondrial health, and inflammation reduction
Prime Revival
Coaching organization where a caller's coach now works after helping rebuild healthy relationship with food and training
People
Sal DeStefano
Co-host providing coaching advice on nutrition, training, and body composition to callers
Adam Schaefer
Co-host discussing metabolic adaptation, reverse dieting, and calorie optimization for fat loss
Justin Andrews
Co-host providing athletic development and youth training guidance; intervened in flag football game conflict
Chad Wesley Smith
Referenced for research on childhood sports development and multi-sport participation benefits; episode 952
Corinne
Sal's client used as case study for metabolic adaptation and body composition challenges during dieting
Patrick Mahomes
Referenced as example of multi-sport athlete (baseball and football) with superior body control and athleticism
Tiger Woods
Referenced as example of early specialization with later swing changes due to repetitive overuse injuries
Michael Jordan
Referenced as example of athlete whose early diversification might have enhanced performance
Serena Williams
Referenced as example of early sports specialization leading to professional success
Jack Reacher (Actor)
Referenced for body cam video showing conflict with neighbor while riding motorcycle with children
Quotes
"You want to build your way out of this plateau. You don't want to cut your way out of this plateau."
Adam Schaefer•~00:45:00
"The reason why it feels so stubborn is because your old methods stop working."
Sal DeStefano•~00:50:00
"Of course you did this. You're under a lot of pressure. You got kids, you got a job, and I just beat you up all the time. And so of course you wanted to escape a little bit."
Sal DeStefano•~02:15:00
"The most important thing to focus on with a young athlete is body awareness and kinesthetic ability, more important than anything else."
Justin Andrews•~03:30:00
"You're going to feel your best and be your healthiest between 22 to 25% body fat for the rest of your life."
Adam Schaefer•~04:45:00
Full Transcript
Buying a car can feel like guesswork. Is it really the right price or should you wait? With CarGurus you get unbiased deal ratings, price change history and trusted dealer reviews, so you can spot a great deal and buy with confidence. Go to cargurus.co.uk for complete vehicle details without any surprises. That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S.co.uk. CarGurus.co.uk. CarGurus. Search. Buy. Sorted. If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump. Mind pump. With your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer and Justin Andrews. You just found the most downloaded fitness, health and entertainment podcast. This is Mind Pump. Today's episode, callers called in. Live on air, we got to coach them, which is always fun. By the way, that happened after the intro. Today's intro was about an hour long. In the intro, we talk about fat loss, muscle gain, workouts, diet, current events, family life. By the way, if you want to be a live caller on an episode like this, what you do is you submit your question to nplivecaller.com. This episode is brought to you by some sponsors. The first one is Caldera Lab. They make skincare products that are biomimetics. They're trying to mimic how the skin actually works and they're all natural. This is why people love Caldera Lab. I mean, you notice a difference after one or two applications with skin moisture, balancing, even with acne. I notice less fine lines and wrinkles. In fact, over 80% of participants in the Caldera Lab studies have shown the same thing. Anyway, if you go through our link, you can get yourself 20% off. Go to calderalab.com forward slash mind pump. Use the code mind pump 20. That'll get you 20% off. This episode is also brought to you by ketone IQ. This is a ketogenic diet in a bottle. Ketogenic diet is when you eat no carbohydrates whatsoever. Now your body burns ketones for energy and you get mental clarity. It's awesome, except you're not eating carbs, which sucks. We all like carbs and it's great to work out with carbs. You get better pumps the whole deal. Now you can drink ketone IQ. You just take a shot of one of their small bottles of their ketone IQ product and boom, ketones in your system, even if you eat carbs and you get all the effects, the clarity, the focus, the smoothness, the energy. Try them out for yourself. See what I'm talking about. Go to ketone.com. That's K-E-T-O-N-E.com forward slash mind pump. That link can get you 30% off your subscription. Plus you can get a free gift with your second shipment. We also have a sale on nutrition calls with mind pumps certified and approved personal trainers and coaches. These are our coaches. We hired them. Our team trains and develops them. Here's what you do. You go to mindpumpnutrition.com. You get a 45 minute call with one of our coaches who breaks down your diet and nutrition and sets you up with a 12 week plan. It's normally $99, but right now if you go to mindpumpnutrition.com, use the code April 50. It's 50% off. So half of $99 is like $48.50. By the way, this offer expires today at midnight. So if you catch this episode in time, act on it. Mindpumpnutrition.com, the code April 50. All right, real quick. If you love us like we love you, why not show it by rocking one of our shirts, hats, mugs, or training gear over at mindpumpstore.com? I'm talking right now. Hit pause, head on over to mindpumpstore.com. That's it. Enjoy the rest of the show. One of the most frustrating things that people can suffer through when trying to lose weight is that last stubborn 10 pounds. You're losing weight, doing great. Then you get about 10 pounds away from your goal. It won't budge no matter what you do. So what do you do? We have the answer. Check it out. What do you do? All right, let's talk about it. Why is this so stubborn? Why is it that this, because this is common. You often hear about this, that last 10, 15 pounds just won't come off my body. What's that body's job? I was going to say, you've got to argue there's an evolutionary reason for this, right? I mean, your body has got to be the leaner you get. The harder it gets, the leaner. Yeah, the harder it gets to get leaner. It's not, you would think, I guess, common thought would be, as I get in my rhythm and I'm consistent with my training in my diet, it should get easier and easier, but it's actually the opposite. It gets harder and harder the leaner you get. I mean, I think the initial weight loss or body fat drop for somebody who's, say, north of 30% body fat is relatively easy. But as you get closer and closer to that, either for men, single-digit body fat for women, low 20s, it becomes really difficult every percent to get lower. Yeah, but you also hear this from people who aren't even trying to get that low. You'll just hear people who are like women who are trying to get like 26% body fat or guys who are trying to get to 16 or 17% and then they're 10 pounds away from their goal and then suddenly everything stops. And what's happening oftentimes, because now if you're just doing things wrong and you're eating more suddenly and stuff like that, that's different. But let's say you're doing everything consistently and then suddenly you get stuck, you've hit a metabolic wall is what happened. And so to put it in as simple terms, and of course, it's more complicated than this, but simply speaking, when you're losing body fat, you have to be in what's known as a calorie deficit. You have to be burning more than you're taking in, okay, or taking it less than you're consuming. And your body doesn't like to be in this place. Your body doesn't like to burn more calories than you're taking in. It has to borrow to make up the difference and it borrows energy from hopefully body fat, just like if you were spending more money than you were making, at some point, you look at your bank account and you go, yeah, we got to figure out how to spend less. And so your metabolism adapts, you actually, your body starts to burn less calories. And one of the ways it does this is it, it'll pair muscle down. And in my experience, this is where this happens is where a person's losing weight, and they're eating less, eating less, moving more, moving more. And then they get in this place where they're like, I got to eat even less. I don't feel like I'm eating that much at all. I'm really hungry. I'm already working out a lot. I don't think it's realistic knowing what my schedule is like and my consistency behaviors are like, to add more exercise. Is that what I got to do? I got to just, I got to cut even more my calories and exercise even more. And a lot of coaches and a lot of trainers will say, yeah, that's what you got to do because that's the easy answer, but it's not actually the best answer. When you get stuck in this place where you hit that metabolic wall, what you often need to do to get the last 10 pounds off your body is to change gears and try to boost metabolism or try to make your metabolism learn or want to burn more calories. And so oftentimes when I'm working with someone and they're stuck on those last 10 pounds, we do a reverse diet and start focusing on building muscle so that we can get the 10 pounds off. Start giving them resources. I mean, it's literally like you're signaling your body, your demand for calories is very high because of that amount of activity you're producing, but the resources are very low. And so your body's like, well, now we need to adjust for this and maintain whatever resources we can hold on to. Totally. So it's just like we're trying to go against our natural mechanisms there and you just inevitably hit a wall. So reversing out is pretty much the answer. I'd say this is pretty obvious when you know the calorie intake for both whether it be for the female or male. Like so typically if someone's hit this wall and they're a female, they're under 2000 calories. They're eating. And so it's like very obvious. It's like we usually around 15. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But anything under 2000 if they hit this wall, I'm going back the other way for sure. You're already at that low. Like for me under 2000 for a female and anything really under 2500 for a male would be the same thing. Same thing guy, a guy who's eating, you know, 2400 something calories and that he's hit that wall. So I think that has a lot to do with it because if someone came to me and they're like, Oh, I hit this wall, I can't lose last 10 pounds. And she's eating 2600 calories. So we still have, we still have room. That's right. We still have room to cut and still be in a healthy place. And a guy comes in and he says, Oh, I've hit the wall, I can't lose the last 10 pounds. And I go, Well, how was your calories? Oh, I'm 3400 calories. Okay, well, easy. Yeah, well, easy. We have room. But typically this happens when somebody has already played the cutting, cutting and moving more game. And they have now found themselves exercising, you know, four to six times a week, plus maybe even cardio or lots of steps and activity. And their calories are now in the low 2000s or under 2000 calories. And it's like, where do we go from here? And it's you're in, which is why I think so many people put all the weight back on, because it's just not sustainable. It's not a sustainable place to be for probably 95% of the population, unless you are obsessed with exercise, it's just not a good place to be. And so yeah, it's almost always a reverse diet. Yeah. And you, and this is so common that you even see this in people who use a GLP medication, which are powerful, these are powerful medications that just like really crush faster because we saw, we saw people like this, we worked personally, we worked with a group of 50, 50 plus people. And there were people on there who had lost significant weight on a GLP. So they were, they were, they had to lose, I think it was close to north of 80 pounds initially, they'd gotten something like 60 pounds off. There was another 30 pounds left. They were at this plateau. There was one person in particular, I can remember, she was at this plateau for like six months. And we were asking her, okay, well, let's, let's look at what you're eating. And she was eating 1200 calories or less a day. Some days, it was a thousand. And she's got 30 more pounds, not to get shredded, but just to get into like a normal healthy place. She had 30 more pounds ago and she was eating, like I said, 1000 to 1200 calories, sometimes even less, she said. And that's a tough, but your, your metabolic rate has some remarkable ability to adapt. It's crazy. We got good studies on this where there's a few ways your body will do this. Some of them are more mysterious than others, but the obvious ones that we can measure, they've done this really well with all, they'll put trackers on people and measure daily activity. And as a person ramps up their exercise and cuts their calories, their body will start to make up for it with reduced activity throughout the day. So without them realizing they're sitting more, they're walking slower, they're doing less movement throughout the day because they're trying to, they're trying to make up for it. Another obvious one is, one with a fargic purpose. Totally. Another one, another obvious one is muscle loss. So when you look at it, just a calorie deficit with activity minus strength training. So no strength training, so no protective exercise when it comes to muscle, you know, you look at 30% to 45% of the weight coming from muscle. And it's not that the body's, not that the person's body is burning muscle away because it needs to burn muscle for energy, but rather it's trying to reduce its demands by taking this tissue that's kind of expensive from a caloric standpoint and bringing it down. And then there's mysterious ways that the body slows its metabolism down. You know, you could have the same lean body mass and have a metabolism that decides to burn more or less calories. This has to do probably with mitochondrial function and other mechanisms. Hormone changes can also affect this as well. So the body just starts to adapt. Stress to overall health. I mean, look at the challenge that Corrine and I are having currently right now, like with just her body not responding the way we would want it to. And it's, it can be very stressful and frustrating for somebody who feels like they're eating really well training and doing all things. And so I don't know, this is the part about personal training. I think it's so valuable and why I think tools like AI will never replace a good coach who can help somebody through this process because I've trained enough people to see anomalies like this all the time where it's just like, this doesn't make sense, you know, and the body sometimes just rebels and the math just doesn't math. It's like this, hey, based off of the amount of activity we're doing and based off of my macros and what I'm eating, this is what should be happening yet. It's, it's not because of all these variables. Yeah. What I used to do back in the day, even before I fully understood reverse dieting, like even because there was a point there where I really understood the concept of reverse dieting, but even before that, when I'd get a client like this and we're doing the traditional, you know, we're doing some strain training, adding some activity, we're tracking calories and macros and we're cutting calories and then they get stuck, you know, 10, 15 pound plateau away from their goal. And it would be for a while and that would give them a good month or two before I decided it was a plateau because you don't get to see this consistent fat loss. It's typically it's like, you'll get a little bit and then it'll stop for a few weeks and it goes down again. But once I established like, oh, this is a plateau, before I even understood what reverse dieting was, I just knew this person needed a mental break. So they'd come to me and that we, we talk like, okay, we're plateauing here and I'd say, you know what we're going to do for a little while, we're going to try to stop losing that last 15 pounds. Just going to focus on getting strong for a little while. We're just going to focus on getting you stronger than Jim for a little while. It's a different focus. It feels good. And what tends to happen when we start to get stronger is then the fat loss starts to happen. Here's what everybody wants to do when they're stuck with that last 10 pounds. They want to increase their activity and cut their calories more. Harder. Here's what most people need to do. Build their way out of this plateau. Yeah. You don't want to cut your way out of this plateau. You want to build your way out of this plateau. Far more successful strategy. I can almost always break through this kind of a plateau through a really structured, let's get stronger phase, which typically includes an increase in calories, hitting protein targets, changing the structure of my workouts a little bit. Oftentimes I even reduce the volume. And I'm looking at, look, let's just put some, let's see if we can get more weight on the bar. And then that's the plateau buster. Whereas a lot of people are like, no, no, I got to run more. I got to eat less. Let me cut even more. The reason why it feels so stubborn is because your old methods stop working. And then to make it worse, especially if your calories are already low, here's where it's really frustrating. Because I talked about the person who's like, I don't want to cut anymore. I don't want to move anymore. You oftentimes even get the person who's like, fine, I'm going down lower. I was at 16 or calories. I'm going down to 1200 calories. And then I'm going to add an extra day of cardio. And they got 10 more pounds to lose. And then this is where it gets really crazy. And I've seen this more than a handful of times. Shoot them up. So see those see their weight shoot up sometimes. Oh, this is what this is what's what's more common. I've seen that too, which is that people are just like, I don't understand what's going on. But I've seen this is more common. We'll see like three pounds down on the scale, plateau again. Then we'll do a body composition test. And we're like, it's looks like your body fat percentage went up. How is that possible? I lost three pounds. It was muscle. You lost three pounds of muscle. Our nutrient intake was too low. Seving like that. And yeah, you're smaller, but you lost muscle. So your body fat percentage actually went up. Boy, is that really my favorite story around this Adam is crashing when you talk about what you do with your trainers. I love that story because you have a bunch of trainers. Yeah, that experience this. I mean, you've told him before I would love to hear that story again, because you're not talking about a bunch of everyday people who don't know how to actually these are trainers. Yeah, I went through it. No, I mean, it's it was a competition. Justin was a part of this. And I used to do this on the fair fairly regular basis annually with my trainers where we'd have fun. We used to have the hydrostatic way I had a relationship with that company and they used to bring the truck. So we had an outside source. This was like what was great about it was that it was very controlled, right? So it wasn't like a bunch of mirror. Yeah, it wasn't a mirror. It wasn't a bunch of people that were randomly like different trainers. They weren't doing their own calipers. Yeah, they weren't doing their own calipers. It was an outside source that was scheduled. Third party. Yeah, third party and real accurate too. So you know, and we would we would test and then the goal was to you know, who could have the greatest body composition change. How long was it for by the way? Three months, I think is what we used to do. Yeah, about three months is what we would do. So 90 days is so you could lose the most body fat. Yeah, it was it was three or four months that we would do it for. And by the way, what was the prize? Was it bragging rights? We used to put money in the pot. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, everybody put money in the pot. And then of course, bragging rights. Yeah, bragging rights. Even though there was money involved, I think it was just. Yeah, when you're in a gym, you want to be the guy. Yeah, and this was also too, by the way, this is like, the staff I'm talking about with Justin was my elite staff. There was a period of time where I had trainers and I've shared before where I had got it down to about 15 trainers and they were all master level. So these aren't a bunch of like newbie trainers, rookie. These are all multiple certification, multiple certs, yeah, master trainers. Everyone's really good at what they do. And everybody was really fit too. It was just taking your fitness to another level. And man, the amount including myself of trainers that were just like, this thing doesn't work. This is inaccurate. Oh, yeah, this that shit doesn't work. And them getting online and looking for all the air in it. And it's just like, Oh, I don't think I let it enough air out when I went under. And I'm talking about extreme methods to get guys doing burpees in the sauna. Oh, yeah. All kinds of stuff to lose weight, lose weight rapidly and to cut as hard as they could. So they were doing things like that. And because you have a bunch of trainers who probably are in very healthy metabolic places too. You keep that in consideration too. They're coming from a healthy metabolic place. You're talking about some situations that could have people that aren't healthy, have hormone issues. These are all very balanced. This is a bias of fit people. Yeah. So if anybody should have an easy time of shredding down, it should be these guys and girls. And oh, yeah, at least half, you know, would come back and be incredibly frustrated. And you had situations where trainers body fat percentage actually went up because they would lose weight on the scale. Yeah, they're like super encouraged. I'm winning. I lost 10 pounds. Yes, but they did through too much calorie restriction, too much cardio. Yes. Yeah. And that's exactly what happened. And whatever, like I said, like it would have resulted in is a bunch of pissed off trainers. It was such a, that I talk about that time in my career. And I want to try to remember what year I'm at San Atresa. So I'm about eight, nine years into my career at that time, maybe a little further along. And so I consider myself a relatively experienced towards the good part of being what I consider myself good. So that was a very eye opening moment for me that time. And then of course, when I got into competing and took that to a whole another level on consistency and also be presenting myself and even lower, really just open my eyes to how easily people can dip into that. How the body works. Yeah, exactly. And how they can fluctuate. And I mean, just, you know, I hope, I hope Corinne, I'll ask her, hey, I know she listens because she's, she's heard us talking about her. I hope she's okay and comfortable with me continuing to share. But I think she's such a great example because she's brilliant. She knows what to do. She's great at coaching clients that are showing this, but even herself is challenged with this. And we have these moments where we just had a week where I gave her a diet break and we have a diet break and I cut her like 500 calories a day, 500 calories a day. Her steps were like a 10,000, which is increased from 8,000 steps. So where she's no cardio, but just increased activity, reduced calories. And so we really was more about the diet break. And every Sunday we have a check-in photos, weights, I get all her stats and everything like that. And we're up two and a half pounds on the scale. Post period too, by the way. So last way and things of that, we're in the thick of period, holy water, all things of that. So logically, as trainers, you go, okay, there's no way she's gaining fat in this week, but her body weight on the scale is up two or three pounds in a calorie reduction like that. And so the body, we expect it to work on this perfect 24-hour clock because that's what we've decided a day is, but it doesn't work that way. Your hormones and are fluctuating, your sodium intake and the boy or body is storing water. There's so many things that can manipulate it. The time you decided to get on the scale that day and hop on it and measure it and could be really discouraging. And I think the common mistake is the course correction when you're doing a lot of the right things. And so it's super common. Trainers are not immune to it. They battle with it just as much. But again, the big lessons that I have learned through that is to trust the process and to continue to stay the course because what I have found is in a lot of times, what I'll expect to happen from like with Corinne is continuing down the path we're going and then all of a sudden, it seems like the body catches up. And the analogy I kind of give is the way we talk about how children grow. Yeah, in these weird spurts, it's not like you feed your kid, when your kid rests and they grow over years. We all know that everybody knows this, right? And what we used to think, scientists used to think back in days, it was just this real incremental slow gradual all the time type of growth. And what we've learned is that it's not like that at all. In fact, they can look flat lined for a period of time. And then all of a sudden, boom, this like spurt happens. And a lot of times in the muscle building game and the fat loss game, that your body responds that way, you doing all the right things. And so that it's just like, no results, no results, this sucks. I'm not seeing the results. Maybe even see a little bit of negative results. And then boom, one week you have and it's like, you look like you lost a percent or two body fat. And so this, this makes this difficult for people. It does. I remember for myself, one of the first times I allowed myself, I say allowed because my challenge was, you know, I always wanted to gain weight. But the first time I actually stuck through a diet where I was trying to get myself down to life below 10%. And I remember it got kind of hard towards 9% body fat, you know, appetite goes up the whole deal. But I got there. And then I bumped my calories. I'm like, cool, I got here. Let me just eat more and bump my calories. Now, at this time, I had been doing regular caliper testing. Okay, so body fat testing, I had somebody test me. And I remember I bumped my calories was eating more, of course, you feel great, more energy, stronger in the gym. And two weeks later, I'm like, I just had a curiosity. Let me see where my body fat percentage is. I went up on the scale. I remember how many pounds, like four or five pounds. And I was down to just below 8%. And I remember being like, what? How did this, how, how is it that I ate more and I got leaner, I built, I built into it. You know, body fat percentage, this is a percentage of your body that's body fat. So what that means is, if you're listening right now, and I snap my fingers and you gain 10 pounds of just muscle, just muscle, so you're 10 pounds heavier than the scale, your body fat percentage went down. Even if you don't lose a single pound of body fat. So I think what a lot of people need to do in this situation here, where they've been losing, losing, losing, they've been doing the what they think is the right thing, cutting their calories and doing more activity. Now they're stuck with that plateau, that stubborn last whatever, 10 pounds, 15 pounds, build your way out of it, watch what happens. It's this is when the magic starts to happen. I will working with your body. I will add to that though, as you to mentally prepare you psychologically, because the most difficult part is there's an uncomfortable phase of that. And I think that's why it gets so difficult, which we've all whether you're the person who is obsessed with getting big. And so the cutting part or vice versa, you're afraid to get big. There they'll come up, they'll come a time where you're doing the right things. And you'll feel uncomfortable or it won't feel right. And I can't stress enough, the advice you're giving is right is just to keep building the direction. And what I have found, so long as you're eating whole foods, hitting your protein intake, right, and feeding the body that way, you will be you won't, you won't put on a bunch of body fat. They're not gonna mess up if you reverse diet, and you're basically calling your reverse diet or reverse diet, but what you're really doing is allowing yourself to eat whatever you want whenever you want. And you're hungry, like that's where healthy food. Yeah, but if you if you do this, where you're like you're saying is reverse diet out when you're hungry, feed, feed a whole whole natural meal type of deal and leave with protein. I can't I don't think I've ever seen anybody not have success. They will probably go through a little bit of a uncomfortable phase. If you're really low calorie, and you have someone bump 300 to 500 calories, that could be a third of their day. You're gonna gain some water, yeah, you're gonna gain some water weight that you're gonna hold on to a little bit, which will make you feel like, Oh my God, I got fatter. But trust me, 500 calories didn't put a pound of fat on you, even if it put two or three pounds on the scale, it didn't put a pound of fat on you. And just keep going that direction. And you will you eventually speed that metabolism up, you will build your way out of that that body fat reduction you want. And then kind of what we talked about the other day, so many times too, and this is a this is a recent lesson for myself. The last body fat test that discouraged or upset me. But then which I thought was so this is the opposite of the situation I've had. I felt like, I look pretty good. Wives compliment me, I'm feeling pretty good. I'm back to the walking around naked in the house brushing my teeth, get a body fat test that came back went, that's not good. And that and it messed with my head. And because I'm like, it wasn't the number that I expected, I'm really good at being able to guess that. But the truth is, I just have I have more muscle under the body fat that I have this time. And when I actually think about it, I'm like, you know what, I like that. I don't mind. And so a lot of people are stuck on this scale number or body fat percentage number, but if they would just put more muscle on their body, funny, a woman at 24% body fat who gains muscle and even stays the same body fat. So she gained some body fat with it. So 24, 24, more muscle, you look leaner, you have more shape. Yeah, you've got more sculpt same thing for a man. So yeah, more muscle at looks better at higher body fat percentage and less muscle. So I had a question for you guys. Is there a recently, have either one of you guys almost got into a street fight? Well, just wouldn't the street fight or like a field fight? I've been holding on. I've been dying fast. I'm so shocked. You know, like, I think you hear a lot of stories of like, literally games and, and you know, our parents go crazy. And like, just too interactive and they just don't let the ref. So he did. And really like, what's crazy about so I left the studio and I was like, wasn't sure if I was going to make the game because it's pretty far to get there from here. This is Everett's flag football. Yeah. So he's having a flag football game. So he's in the playoffs now. So there's that extra bit of intensity, you know, and so I left and I got there a little bit before the half. So I kind of didn't get a lot of the context of like how the games were going. Like Courtney wasn't like, keep me updated. I get in there and it's like, just you feel the tension like already is very good game. Like, and so we were actually behind by like two touchdowns when I got there. And then we started making all this progress, like, right when I got there. And I'm just like, yeah, like, you know, yelling, they're looking back at me like, and it was like, the coaches were close to us. The spectators are on one side. Our teams on the other side. And so there was a lot of like engagement between their coaches. You're on the you're on the visitor side. We're on the visitor side with this. So I think that's kind of where, you know, some of the conflict when you get into the intensity of like, you know, that's my son out there and you're not made a good call. Like there was a lot of talking with their coach was very, very, uh, overstepping with the referees. And he was like, you know, he's flag guarding, he's doing this, like, like every single thing, how much time they're going to have on the field to figure this out. And he's like counting down the seconds they had in between plays and like saying like they're going over and it was like just overkill, you know, and, uh, and I'm just kind of like just trying to acclimate and get there and see what's going on. And, um, you know, Courtney's trying to update me with this. And, um, and then there was like a lot of this chatter from one of the moms on our side and their coach specifically, and it was like, so she's in the stand and she's barking at him and he's down in the field. Yeah. So they, there's no stands. It was all field. Oh, so it was like a soccer field. Ah, got it. Yeah. And so we were like, I was like in the shade. So it was a hot day. So there was like a whole bunch of parents like in the shade and there was parents that were like right there on the field right next to behind their team. Okay. Uh, and the other part was funny because I was showing up knowing that it's the team that like I grew up at this school. Uh, and they, so every time we play them, there's this like added bit, like I kind of know the, their kids and I kind of know the mentality. Like it's really funny coming back to sports now as an adult and you see kind of like the culture of different schools and like kind of the vibe and yeah, like so we grew up and our fans were like really engaged and like very like, uh, you know, vocal. Yeah. And my dad still kind of has that energy and I'm always like calming him down like, dad, you know, like, let's let the game play, let the kids have fun, let the refs call the game. Yeah. Yeah. And so nobody was like checking the fans and, you know, regulating this. And so it just kept getting more intense and more intense. We started coming back. Um, and you know, the kids were, were feeling a lot of this and, uh, then they started to kind of like scuffle and like it was getting a little bit violent. Like one of the kids like were grabbing for the, um, for the flag and then it ends up tackling the kid and then they're, oh, the parents get all crazy. So anyway, it turns out like we ended up winning the game and so you guys came back and won, came back one and it was like, it was, it was epic. Like we got like a safety and then like, so we just won by like, I think it was like two points or maybe, maybe four. I think they missed like some extra point conversions along the way, but, um, super close and it was like a great game. Like I wish it was just the game, you know, with the kids and that was it, right? And we all like, yeah, good game, good game, you know, good sportsmanship, but it was like, it just got kind of escalated after the game. The coaches kind of came over and they were like barking at some of the parents. And one of the, one of the coaches, this is where I kind of got triggered because, um, so one of the moms like was kind of still yelling because of one of the calls and, um, even after she won. So this was like, it's like, yeah, we're like right at the end. And she said something and then one of their coaches was like, who let this lady out of the house and like, get back in the kitchen. You know, oh, he said that. Yeah, dude, like super draugatory. And I was just like, I was like, I was like, Hey, watch your mouth. You know, I'm like, I yell back at their coach because I just was like, dude, that's not cool. You know. And, uh, and so they're all just, and he turns around and just kind of like looks back and he sees Justin. Well, so we have another, uh, parent who's, he's this big jacked, like Asian guy. And he's, um, when his kids like plays, I've seen them at basketball games, but he just like calmly kind of walks over, uh, to, to their coaches after the game. And he's just like trying to like, like, Hey man, like what, why, like, why are you guys engaging so much, you know, with, let's just let the kids play. And he was trying to be kind of like, check them and be a little bit diplomatic about it. But then the coaches like kind of went off the hinges on him. So yelling at him, getting his face. And then like this other coach was kind of swarming over to the side of him. And then some other people were coming this way. And so I was just like, you know, talking to Courtney and I saw this all kind of for me, you know how when, when they start swarming and trying to kind of like zone in on one person, I was like, nah, dude. So I just, I walked right up, uh, to them and I kind of tapped on the coaches on the floor. I was like, what's going on over here? And he just kind of looks over at me and she's like, Oh no, no, no, no, we're a good boss. We're a good boss. And then he's like, yo, he's like grabs the coaches. No, no, we gotta go. We got, because Justin came over. It was so funny, dude, because it was like literally on the brink of, and you felt it like, you know, it's an air, like I felt like they were going to like attack this guy. That's exactly what I pictured when he texted us. I'm like, Oh, I know what happened. They started getting loud at each other. And then Justin walked over and they thought it's probably not a good idea. If we just probably chill out. Well, I was telling Sal, I was telling Sal when you're out in the bathroom, I said, Justin has it when these moments happen, Justin has that look on his face that's like, I want to use that shoulder press. I'm looking for an excuse. I've been barren this year. Let me let it out. I have some moves on. I've never like really kicked somebody hard. I've always wanted to do that. Oh my God. I was thinking about these things in my head. I was like, it just is like a switch, though, because like, I'm like, well, you're disrespected. You know, I'm like, I'm not okay with that. Like if they do anything, like they're done. And you know, the funny thing about this is that all four of us were put in a situation like this, the most likely to fight would be Justin and then Doug and then you or I, which I think is so opposite of what people would think. I don't know. I don't know. I think you have some disrespect. Well, okay. I'm quit when I'm quick about. So if someone was, if one of you guys, I would definitely be the first person. It was my wife. That's right. And she didn't have like her husband wasn't there or anything. She was in, they were kind of like verbally attacking her and like, and I was just like, no, anyways, it was one of those things. You know, it's okay with it. You know, it just reminds me of that video you guys showed me. Was it you that showed me from that actor from Jack Reacher? Oh, yeah. What's the actor's name? Does anybody know? I don't know. Everybody knows him by Jack Reacher. Yeah. He's got a body cam on and he's riding his motorcycle with his kids, with his kids and his kids have like motorbikes and they look young, bro. They look like they're seven, eight, maybe nine, maybe, I don't know, like little kids. Allen Rich, Rich son. Okay. And they're riding around a neighborhood and his body cam, you can watch the video online. And one of his neighbors stands in front of him to the point where he has to dump his bike. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, you're riding around this neighborhood. He's like yelling at him. Yeah. And he's like, yo, man, what are you like, are you drunk? Like what's going on? And so they go back and forth a little bit, gets on his bike again. And he's obviously irritated. So he revs it. Yeah. The neighbor gets right in front of him again. And then that's when he snaps and punches a guy. But I'm like, what a terrible situation to be in because your kids are there. Yeah. I was like, part of me is like, I don't want to get violent in front of my kids. But then part of me is also like, I think he, I think he handled it right. I think he handled it right. Yeah. Like, I mean, I think that goes through your mind in the moment. I think he did it. I think he eventually, he eventually pushed a guy down and pummeled his ass. But I mean, he first tried to defuse it, or was like, what are you doing? You know what I'm saying? And the guy was still, you know, berating and coming. It was like, it would be different if he hopped off his bike and just started whooping the dude's ass, right? That's a different story. But he jumped in front of him, which is not, that's like dangerous. Yeah. You know, he had to dump his bike as a result. But that's, that's like, the last thing you want to do as a parent, because listen, you might think it's like, you get a situation like that, lose your temper. It's, it's a terrifying for your kids to see your dad do this. Remember, you shared this story a long time ago about the kid who threw a basketball at the back seat. Yeah, dude, he threw a ball at, I was driving with my, this is my older kids were little and we're driving. There was a teenage kids playing basketball. And as we drove by, one of them thought it would be funny to throw the basketball at the car. And it bounced off the back window. My daughter, who at the time was little, she was a little, who's like three or four maybe. And I'm already feeling the fumes because they hit the ball up. And I was going to keep driving, but then I looked at my review, my daughter looked terrified, and that was it. I snapped. That's when I pulled over and they all ran inside and I tore their basketball hoop up through. My kids never forgot that. You know, that whole thing. And I regret, you know, losing my temper like that or whatever. But man. Did I share with you guys the, the, like, I told you when the whole thing happened with my car, the, the M8 getting like, totaled, right? Like the, like, I was like, trying to, what is the lesson that I'm supposed to get from all this? I'd say one of the things that like came up for me that was really interesting. I shared with Katrina, she's like, Oh my God, I've never heard you tell that story before. And I'm like, well, I hadn't, I said, I hadn't thought about it. I hadn't came up because I was like really trying to figure out like, what, what is this supposed to be about? It's supposed to be like detachment from material things, like whatever and not care. And you know, I don't know, you guys weren't around. I think Doug saw a little bit, but I was like really just so calm about the whole thing and concerned about the guy who did hit it and everything like that. Inside my heart was broken. But really tried to handle it with like, okay, what's the, what's my lesson here? And so when I was 16, the first real materialistic thing that I ever obsessed over or loved was my Acura Integra was the first car. The first thing I ever got that was worth more than a thousand dollars. And I love that car. Every dollar that every paycheck went into that thing. And so I don't know if you know this or, but I, right after I had it for like maybe six months, I'm, I'm, I'm in the middle lane to, to turn into a grocery store to go left. And it's just pouring down rain. It's that kind of rain where your windshield wipers go as fast as possible and they still can't clear the rain off fast enough. It's raining like that. And a lady drifts over and clips me. And when I, I'm in the rain and I'm in that and slides, I in my head think it's like a little bump and I get out and I see my car and it's actually smashed in the exact same spot. It looks exactly the same as the M8. And I go, I go ape shit. I'm a stupid 16 and a half, 17 year old kid, you know, and someone just broke my toy and I'm screaming and yelling and I'm all I rate out in the middle of the road with night raining down and I'm going, and it was an old lady that was in the car. And she was so scared she wouldn't get out of the car until the cops came. The cops finally came and were there was when she finally would open her door and come out because here's this teenage boy who's, you know, yes, yes, yes. And I don't, I can't see who she is that, you know, I'm just mad. I'm just mad. But I was cussing and swearing and swinging my arms and just like so pissed when I saw it. I thought, Oh, that's so crazy because that was, I mean, I walked up on that situation with that guy and it was the total opposite. It was like, I didn't do that at all. It's more concerned about, I was like, bro, we should probably get out of the car because he's in the middle of the middle of the street still and he was totally kind of out of it. But I had forgot about that memory completely about that part of that, at least that part of that moment. I was like, Oh, that's right. I forgot that. When you saw the old lady, did you say sorry or were you still? No, totally not. I was, you're still too young. No, totally. I was so in my own my own moment. I was in I'm a young, dumb 17 year old kid. I still was mad at her. You know what I'm saying? Like I didn't, the only reason I only thought about that now was like, Oh, that's right. I forgot that she was so scared that she stayed in her car. I had someone who scared me in my car, like terrified the hell out of me when I was 16 years old. I was driving this one. I had a, I bought my first car that was mine was a Toyota pickup truck and I put rims on it was just a four banger. Like there's not even have AC or power steering, but you know, my own car, but you had ribs. I had ribs on it and I thought it was fast, which it wasn't. It was like 160 horsepower, 4,400, but I was driving and there was a truck next to me and I thought I'd race them because that's what I did all the time. And I took off at the light, went in front of them, put my hazards on because that's what you do when you beat someone, right? To show them. And then I break checked them a little bit like, Oh yeah, I beat you. Well, it turned out to be the biggest human being I've ever seen in my life. He pulled up next to me and he was so mad and yelling at me and he was huge. He was the big, he was jacked and huge and yelling at me. Check somebody that is and I kept, and I was looking at him and I kept saying to him, I'm just a kid. I'm just a kid. And then I got, I had to stop at a stoplight and I stopped and he got out of his car and he was just as big as I thought he was. And he tried to rip my side view mirror off and I kept telling him, I'm just a kid. And he got in his car and took off. And I remember being like, Oh man, that was really scary. And years later, so now I'm 18. I'm the fitness manager at 24 fitness in Hillsdale. One of my trainers was a competitive bodybuilder brought in his friend, Mr San Jose. It was that guy. He didn't recognize me. Yeah, he walks in. I know you're talking about big white dude. Yes, massive. He was a gold gym. Yeah, I know. Huge white dude. Yeah, this is back in 97 or 98. I used to call him Troy. So you go look him up if you want. He looks like that guy from Troy, but he walked in. He didn't recognize me, of course, but I looked and I'm like, Oh shit. I had something that happened. I was like in college and I was like pulling out of campus and there's this guy like, you know, I could see him in my rear view mirror, like just like tailgating everybody behind and like swerving going all crazy. And he finally got to me and so I decided like, screw this guy. I'm gonna break check him and I just kept break checking him. And I could see the guys raging and going crazy. And then we get to the stoplight and I'm here and he's next to me and he's like, yo, and I'm rolling down my window. I was like, what are you gonna do? And he literally takes his gun out of the center console. He's got it like this. And I just immediately was like, Oh, it turned right and just sped out to the right like right as like, I still think about that today. Like that's all a bit of huge deterrent for me to ever like get in the road rage stuff. And it's like, why, why, like why didn't I even get involved? Obviously he was like running from the cops or like something like he was not, you never know. You don't want to mess with people. Now it's like so hard to get me like in that space now, like someone's doing something or whatever. I'm like, whatever. It's not a big deal. And yeah, I've even had the thought like, I've even had this thought where like someone's racing and trying to get around me or whatever. I'm like, what if it's like an emergency? What if the dude is trying to get somewhere or something like that? Yeah, I never know. You know what I mean? Katrina is the master at that. She always has the ability like in those moments to like think of yeah, what if this and it's like, Oh, God, okay, what do you make me feel terrible? You know what I'm saying? Like that's like, you never know. You don't know. You have no idea what that person is you know what it was going through or on their way to. So when I told this story, it's horrible happened to me. I just remembered now. I told this story, maybe a couple of years later, so I'm 19 or 20, told the exact story I just said to a friend of mine who then told me this is a made up story. And he's like, you know, he's like, this is, let me tell you a story that I'm helping is like a dad gets on his on a bus with his two kids and they're just acting up and they're just screaming and climbing the seats and throwing things and everybody's looking at this dad like, why don't you do something about it? Why don't you finally one of the kids spits and it hits this woman and she stands up and screams to the dad, what kind of father are you? Why aren't you, you know, helping your kids and it looks at her goes, I'm sorry, their mother just passed away and they don't know how to handle it. And I remember when I heard that, it crushed me. And I'm like, you know what, you don't know what people are going through. They could very well be massive jerks. They could also be going to someone who knows. Anyway, I was, some more studies are coming out on the best form of exercise for skin, form of exercise or skin, like what form of exercise improves the way skin looks the best. I'm not not cardio. Yeah, I'm gonna you guys know the answer to this. Yeah, you know this when you've seen fitness fanatics and the kind of exercise they do, there's a difference in their skin. Here is what they found in the study. Strength training by far was the best because it increases collagen production systemically. So when you lift weights, obviously, if you're building muscle, you're getting lots of protein synthesis. Part of this is collagen production. Okay, oxidative stress was probably like, well, that's the other part but too much of any exercise. Sure. But it was the only form of exercise to really, really boost collagen production in the skin. So it's like the best form of exercise with good looking skin. Does that is that like, every time you're working out, you get this boost from it or is it like a sustained thing by carrying more lean body mass, you get it? Both. Both. Yeah, you get this, you get this signal that says boost protein synthesis and then over time, your body carries more collagen, matrixes, more just muscle fibers, larger muscle fibers. So it's literally, you think of strength training as muscle building, it's protein building, which includes collagen, which is a protein. Speaking of skin, by the way, so Caldera Lab, one of our partners, one of the reasons why they're so good at what they do, they have a term called biomemetics. Biomemetics. And essentially what their theory or their methodology is, is they want to, they are trying to find and work with natural ingredients that act like skin. So do our formulas mimic, and I'm reading off their website, the skin's natural pathways. In other words, is this how the body, the skin naturally moisturizes, naturally boosts collagen production, naturally reduces damage from UV rays. And that's the foundation of where they look at their compounds and their formulations. So they're not trying to like, because there's different ways to look at this, you can look at it from like, let's figure out what chemicals do this, that the other, or you can say, how does the skin work, and what helps the skin work? How do you work with the skin? How do you test and measure something like that? I don't know, dude. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, there's a way to do it, because we've used, people have used pharmaceuticals to clear skin and do things like that, right? That's normally like something, they're killing the bacteria or killing something. Yeah, it's kind of taking over the job. Yeah. Now, that's a good point. Like you want to get rid of a bunch of bacteria. We could either antibiotic the heledia, or we could figure out a way to improve the microbiome of whatever we're looking at. Right, and that's, and that's got to be the difference, right? Like most of your, your chemical face products are designed to like kill and like start over on it, right? Like an antibiotic where this is doing something more like a probiotic. That's right. Right? I don't know if that's a way to. No, no, that's a good, that's a good example. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Doug, that picture you pulled up before, by the way, that was not Mr. San Jose. That was Mike Modorazo, who was a. Yeah, I couldn't find your Mr. San Jose. Yeah, I would love to see a picture of this guy. I feel like I know who it is. I feel like I know who it is. Six foot tall white dude, flat top. Oh, flat top? Oh, he was bald, the one I'm thinking of. Oh, maybe he was bald. He was six foot. He was a tall dude for a bodybuilder. You're obviously huge. Jacked. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I know who it is. I know. I feel like I know. That's why I want to see a picture. I remember. Is he still personal training? I have no idea. I think he's still personal training. White dude, like straight up white dude. His face was red when he was yelling at me. I remember that part. Just veins in the forehead. I remember that part. Yeah, I feel like we have to know. I mean, the chances that we don't know him would be the higher. Did you guys see what happened with Facebook, Instagram, with meta? No. Okay. So they just, I'll pull it up. Oh, wait. So did they just pull a lot of their VR? I heard that they downsized because that was like a huge miss for them. I know that they are, they're cutting on that, but that's not the article. Okay. So the article shows LA jury came out with a verdict that finds Instagram, YouTube, Instagram and YouTube, sorry, were designed specifically to addict kids. Yeah, no shit. So they had to prove this in court, which that's not good for them at all. That's not a good ruling, because if you are found specifically, and here's what my question is, how do they prove this in the court? We're trying to make kids like it versus make it addicting. Yeah, not only that, but like because what's the difference? And then does that open the door for the, all the gaming companies that do the same exact thing? If this kind of verdict sticks and starts to spread, you're right. And I'm going to say this as a parent, you know, you make, if you use addictive science for children, I think that should be heavily regulated. I do. I really do because of the way it affects the brain and development. I think it's a problem. Addictive things for adults. I'm not a fan of either, but at least you're an adult and you can make your own decisions. Yeah. You can, yeah, you can actually discern whether or not like you are addicted. Like it's like, yeah, they're just susceptible to. But you know, I used to be like this huge, like give people choices, make their own decisions. I'm largely still that way, but more and more, I'm realizing that people just humans need help ourselves. Yeah. So are more some sort of a moral foundation. Well, that for sure. Have you guys watched that documentary? It's about plastics. I saw that, but I didn't see it. I didn't watch it. How pervasive it is has become over the last like decade or so. But yeah, it's good. I forget her name, but she was on Joe Rogan before, like hilarious lady. She talks about phallates and like, she did the study with the taints and all that and the size and like reproductive. That's right. Yeah. That study. The study that what about she measured the taints. Oh, you brought one of you brought that up for a long time. They're shorter. Yeah. The smaller, smaller area between the, the, the front and the back. Yeah. Shrinking related. Jesus. Chemicals. Just showing all these petrochemicals. Like, you know what? I'm going to measure taints. I have this weird suspicion that they're shrinking. I have a hunch. Yeah. Like, how do you come up with a, I have a hunch about your lunch. How do you come how many taints do you have to see before you have some sort of correlation, right? To draw to like, I don't know, man, these things are looking smaller than the ones I remember. Yeah. I don't know what websites you got for that. But yeah. So she, I mean, she was a big part of this movement in, you know, trying to kind of check a lot of these petrochemicals that are just everywhere. And there's, there's literally, there's so many regulations that you would hope like, you know, led back in the day as an example, right? Like we found out that this, everybody's IQ is dropping like a few points and then crime went down. Crime went down. So there's all benefits once we started removing that, you know, from, uh, from gas and from like toys and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, why wouldn't we look at like all these other chemicals that are literally in your everyday life and are not beneficial to you in fact are harming. She actually took a bunch, her experiment in this was with couples and fertility, which I thought was, it was really interesting to watch. Like, um, it was like maybe six or seven different couples and they couldn't, you know, conceive. And so they were literally trying out like to live a life without any of this exposure and everyday contact with, um, what did that look like? It was, they just had to literally replace everything. Like there's a lot of companies out now that actually are trying really hard, like clothing wise with, you know, drinking bottles, like everything else, like to start removing a lot of the plastics and a lot of these phthalates. But so what was cool though was, and it was really like, oh man, tugged on your heart a bit because like they, they, they have their story of how many times they've tried, how it's been like 10 years for, you know, some of these couples. And then, and then you see them going through a year of this process and it was like, I think maybe five out of the seven couples or whatever, like we're able to have a kid. And it was remarkable. And you're like, wow, this is crazy. But then, of course, you know, there's, you know, there were some stipulations with the other ones, why it didn't work for them. But like five out of seven is not bad for people who are infertile or having those. Yeah, it was pretty remarkable. But it just made me think about that, like how, how crazy like inundated we are, clothes, bedsheets, medicine, things we drink from medicine. Yeah, as you say, what do you think are the probably the top five? You know, you got to deal with petrochemicals. You can directly kills everything. You can directly connect the use of petroleum and petroleum based chemicals and the growth of the world's population. They are directly related. Sure. And we're so dependent on them that this is a way bigger problem than yeah, we got to get rid of them. So my point is though, like if someone was trying to, to like minimize their exposure, what would be the first five things that you go to house would be wood, glass, aluminum, aluminum, you have all cotton bamboo. Yeah, but that's unrealistic. So go back to what I'm saying. Like you're gonna look the things are, I think of you lay in your bed for eight hours, right? So that's got to be one of the places. You drink out of a bottle or something like that. So probably avoiding plastic cosmetics is a big one. Yeah. Cosmetics. Big one. Okay. Beauty products. What do you got for top five, Doug? Yeah, major sources, soft vinyl toys, vinyl flooring cosmetics. Yeah, but that's what that air fresheners, tape palliates are commonly found. That's what they're found in. I would think of like my son's toys aren't affecting me as much like what's affecting each individual? Like unless you, he's sucking on it, put it on your mouth. I know you think even PVC like the drinking water and all that, you got to replace the like copper and yeah, it's just, there's so many things that's like, yeah, where do you start? She kind of outlines like a good outline for that. You absorb it through your skin. So it's not like you, you know, you play with it, the toy like that. I know, but okay. But so then something on your skin, like I said, like sheets or something like that all night long would be something more than something you just touch for five minutes, right? Yeah. Cosmetics, I'd say is probably one of the worst. Yeah. I would imagine. Yeah. Because you're literally putting it on your skin all day long. I would think drinking, drinking out of a water bottle too would probably be, well, that's the micro plastics, which is a, which is a really big one. Yeah. Did you see that? Oh, that doesn't fall in the same category. So nanoplastics, I don't care what kind of plastic it is, nanoplastics just get stored in your, your organs. So it could be, it could be phthalate free nanoplastics, but it doesn't matter, they accumulate. Yeah. There was that one, right? We're that one study with people with Alzheimer's, they found like a teaspoon worth of nanoparticles in their brain. That's a lot. Yeah, dude. That's a lot for inside the brain. Yeah, it is like a teaspoon. That's what freaked me out. I started taking a psyllium husk as a result of that. Yeah. Yeah. Is that a supplement to help with that? So they, we think so things that bind. So psyllium husk might help. You know what else they found that helps probiotics. Oh yeah. I was saving this for a commercial, but I'll talk about it. There's a freebie there. No, no, no, no, probiotics, probiotics are shown to, because, because your gut microbiome can get rid of a lot of nano, nanoplastics. Yeah. And so there's strains of bacteria that do it. Yeah. They actually tested it like specifically. Yeah. And I mean, if you look too, like a lot of it was, I don't know, dude, the documentary kind of has its bias, right? It's like kind of anti-capitalist on some level, right? Because it's trying to really pressure the, the companies responsible, but you start looking at it too, like they were misleading the consumer by saying like all these things were recyclable, which there was this big movement there, and then it boosted sales and it lasted for another decade of like really inundating us with more plastics. You know, it's one of my favorite examples. Even further. You know, it's one of my favorite examples of like a, we made it, we just, we made a bad stupid decision. Playgrounds, right? The floor on the playgrounds, rubber, the rubber tires, bro, that's the toxic rubber shredded, bro, just giving off all the, all the high school football field. The heat, the heat expresses it. We used to play on wood. It was, it was Timbar. All the, all the high school football fields are out of that too. All the Astroturf. It's the same thing. Yeah. It's all little tiny. I just hate that because I slide and get in my eyes. So Astroturf, like that's the, all the high school football fields now that are all the nice and pretty and they're perfect and they don't have to be watered. That, that, what they're using is tiny little particles of recycled tires. Rubber, rubber beads. Yeah. Doug, look at how much, like what kind of chemical exposure, say chemical exposure from playground flooring. I'd like to see what that says because you can smell it if it's hot. Oh yeah. You know, and it's all bouncy. I guess it's safe. But meanwhile my kids getting, you know, feminized or something. I don't know. I do. Playground surface. What does that say? Hold on. Made from recycled tire, crumb, poured in place, rubber and artificial turf containing toxic chemicals, including lead. Oh my God. Are you serious? And endocrine disruptors that compose risk to children via inhalation, ingestion or skin cut. So no one's going to eat the flooring. Well, I'm sure some people, you think about the kids, but skin contact and breathing. They talked about the kids on playing football. They were like, you're going to tackle and it comes flying up. It's like all these tiny little black dots. I got my eyes and like, I was always like, uh, so for sure it gets ingested and get in your mouth and getting tackled on a football field. What was wrong with Tambark? Why did we switch it out? Is there something wrong with Tambark? I think there was money, bro. Money. Yeah. It can't be recycled. Dude, there's billions of tires that just get thrown away. They found a way to reuse a material. No, I think Justin's right. What do you think? I may be wrong. I bet you Tambark is cheaper, but no, I will. I'll bet that all day long. Tambark is not cheaper than the recycled rubber tires. It's artificial, uh, not artificial turf. If it's trash, it's trash. Rub is the, I don't know. Put down say, is the rubberized, uh, playground flooring cheaper than Tambark? Let's see what that says. I think Tambark is cheap, dude. That's like, it's not, it's not. You don't think so? No, if you ever use, you ever put Tambark in, I mean, I did it for my house. It's not, it's, I mean, it's cheap. It's not like crazy expensive. It's like laying tile, but it's certainly recycled tires that are thrown away or have to be cheaper. Uh, no, rubber playground flooring is not cheaper than with Tambark. Told you. In terms of installation cost. That's done. Googling, bro. I go, oh, hey, hey, I'm just going to tell you this. I am now typing in exactly what's inside. Exactly. You just churned it. No, no, no, no, no, no. Scroll down. Scroll down. Okay. Open that. Open that part right there. Tambark wood mulch. Initial cost low. It's the most budget friendly, often costing about $1.50. For the problem is you have to keep replacing it. That's, I don't think that's why they did it. I think it's cause they thought it was safer. I also, I also want to look up like, Yeah. The port in place was definitely, I also am curious, Sal, we're looking from a retail perspective too, just because people are charging six to $10. Does it mean that they're not getting it? Oh, you're looking at cost. Yeah. Yeah. I think you would like, that doesn't mean that just because we're getting, that's the retail prices right now. I hope something retail for sure. It knows it's more expensive. I would bet money. I'll bet you $50. That the reason why they use the rubber port and stuff or the rubber is because people requested quote unquote safer. I think you're right. Not because it's cheaper because Tambark is cheap as hell. Now over time, I could see how the rubber stuff might be cheaper because you have to replace it like you do Tambark. Well, it's a feature schools like to highlight. Like even my old elementary did that and then they replaced the playgrounds and then as they replace it, they have the rubber coating everywhere and it looks, it's the perception of it is definitely like, oh, it's safer this way. Yeah. See, there you go. Rubber playground flooring is used over Tambark primarily for superior safety, lower long-term maintenance and increased durability. It provides better shock absorption to prevent injuries, does not raw or require annual replacement like Woodmulch and is accessibility friendly. Oh, because you could roll, you could roll in with a wheelchair or something like that probably. That's what I mean. I think it's the whole selling it like, oh, look, Timmy could fall down and not, you know, plus we used to throw Tambark, you know, what you know. I find that really interesting because you would think that stuff that is getting thrown away would be much cheaper. Tyres are getting thrown away. Yeah, he's still got to process it. He's still got to process it and turn it into something else. Oh, you had to process the Tambark. That's it. That was a tree before. Yeah, but Tambark is wood that is cheap and easy to process. It's not like, like, what do you use with Tambark for? Yeah, but there's, there's, there's like, just tires that just get thrown away that nobody, you got to process it, bro. That's why it's so expensive. Yeah. Process it and turn it. It's, I'm telling you, it's the whole like, we got to make things safer. Oh, by the way, saves water. Yeah. I mean, I could see that that's definitely the selling point. I mean, I'm sure that's how they closed everybody on it. I just feel like that. It seems like tires that would be given away. Not to mention, I wonder if the plastic playgrounds do the same thing now. Don't think about it. What? All the playgrounds are plastic. The slides, yep, it is plastic. Is that doing the same thing? Especially getting in the heat. Like, it's, of course, expressing the plastic slide that your kid slides down instead of the old, just giving the old metal one that used to burn you at two o'clock in the afternoon. We got burned. We got burned. Hey, listen, we might have got burned, but our taints are large. Yeah, we got really wide taints. We got big taint, big taint energy shot out to metal slides. Yeah, metal. BTE. I got to talk about my ketone, uh, IQ regimen. It's three a day right now. You guys got to get in. I'm, no, I'm okay. So I was going to tell you sold. So yeah, no, what I like is that I can drink my normal caffeine drinks and then I can have the one that's non-caffeinated. I still get that like mental clarity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you're using it regularly? I do. Well, I wouldn't say regular. I'm not, I'm not, I don't think I do anything as regular as you do. Although my supplement regime has been. I saw you today pouring a bunch of. Yeah, no, I've ever since that I've been pretty good with that. I haven't made my ketone that consistent, but I make it when we, we podcast. So yeah, I do a first thing in the morning, uh, before our first episode, then I do it at lunch, uh, before our second episode. And then I do a third one. You don't do is like a pre-workout before I jump. So I'm using, I'm, I mean, I've tried it before pre-workout, but I like it for like cognitive. So I'll tell you how I'll use it. Right. So we've now done two podcasts basically right now. And then we have a full day left of content shooting. I'll go, I'll take one. Yeah. Busy days. I'm definitely taking. Yeah. Because I, after about three podcasts or say four or five hours of content, whether it's podcasting or we're shooting out there, that's where I start to get mental fatigue. And so I'll, I'll use it now because I've already drank my caffeine early and I'm fine right now, but I know that we've got hours ahead of us. It's so sharp. Yeah. I feel sharp. Doug, uh, when does, uh, is this, when this episode released, we're still, I got some time before. Two days, two days. In two days, maps, push, pull legs comes out. Push, pull legs. Top five, Justin Cole. Crowd, pleaser. Men's version, woman's version. Well, yeah, I hope people prove me right. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be, it'll be fun. And I, I'm excited about this one just cause it's a fun program. People want it. So we did it. And that Wednesday, Cole will be coaching for, for the first three days. You'll get it for free. Yep. There's a new fatty acid that's making waves. It's called C15. So this isn't fish oil. This is a fatty acid that's found in dairy, but when you consume enough of it, you get incredible benefits. You get better cellular aging, or should I say slower cellular aging, mitochondrial health, better skin, reduced inflammation. This is the next breakthrough in fatty acid science. If you want to feel better, if you want to have healthier cells, better skin, better sleep, lower inflammation, try out fatty 15. Go to fatty15.com forward slash mine pump, use the code mine pump and get 15% off. Back to the show. Our first caller is Kristin from Oklahoma. Hi, Kristin. Hi. Thank you for having me on. Yeah. How can we help you? I'm just going to go ahead and get to my question. I clearly did not prove freed before I sent it, but okay. I recently stopped working with a personal trainer. I was with her for about three years. I learned a lot, but it was a lot of pressure and stress. I kind of decided it was time to move on. Now I'm trying to navigate moving forward. I mill prep the four days I work. I still have some disordered eating habits, such as binging mostly with sweets. So I did increase my calories to about 1900. I've considered micro dosing a GLP1 to see if I could help combat the binge eating. Mostly sweets is my biggest issue. I'm currently about 140 pounds and I'm 5'7". I work as a nurse. I have a four and a five-year-old. I'm at the point now with my kids getting older that I can work out consistently. I typically allow 30 minutes a day working out. My brother created me an exercise plan that I shoot for for about four days a week. I do about a six-minute cardio circuit just for heart health. I hit about 8 to 10 K steps a day. My current macros are 155 grams of protein, 175 grams of carbs, 64 grams of fat. I would like to gain muscle, but not sure if I'm getting enough time in the gym for that. I was looking into anabolic for my next program and have been in this program. My brother made me for about three months. I'm just looking for overall health at this point, maintaining and being able to gain strength to be the healthiest I can be. I feel like I would be leaps and bound ahead if it wasn't for the binge eating cycle. You're way under eating. Let's pause for a second, Kristen. I'm going to just sum this all up. You were with a trainer, but you stopped because of the pressure that you put on. You meal prep workout, but you feel like you binge too much on sweets. You're considering a GLP-1. You want to get strong and be healthy. That's your main thing, but then also you're not making progress or at least the kind of progress you think you want to see. Yeah. Let's get specific. What do we want? Do we want health, less pressure, get leaner, stronger? Which one do we want? So obviously I'm like any woman. My husband rolls eyes, but I want obviously the tone look, but I've kind of realized going through all this process that if I want to have a more muscular look, I obviously need to gain muscle and I would have to probably gain some weight with that. So I've kind of decided to shift my mindset and be okay with gaining some weight to get some muscle and then maybe do, I mean, nothing like not an aggressive cut because I don't want to, I want to be able to eat with my family and you know, I'll be super restrictive. Okay. You're already in an aggressive cut just so you know. You going up to 1,900 calories would be considered an aggressive cut for a 5,740 pound woman who does 8 to 10,000 steps and is training 3 to 4 days a week. That's a massive cut. Right now, Corrine, who I'm training right now, okay, is 106 pounds eating 2,700 calories, only getting 8,000 steps into it. Okay. She's like, you need way, way more calories. Now, we work our way up to that. So it's not like I want you to all of a sudden eat 2,700 calories tomorrow. But the reason why, part of one of the reasons why you're binging is because your body is telling you, we need more fuel. We need way and then, and you feel like you're white knuckling it trying to be good. And then what does it want? It wants the fastest source of carbohydrates and fuel as possible because you're depriving it. Okay. So if we were in a more balanced, well-fed diet, it would also help out with the binging. It would, so instead of going to something like a GLP1 and crushing your appetite even more than where you're at, we need to do a proper reverse diet, focus on getting strong and building muscle, not weigh yourself because if you're already in that mindset of I'm okay with a little like, don't focus on the weight, slowly or inquiry, focus on the strength in the gym and feeling good. And that's where our mindset should be and to get our calories significantly up. Like I would want you to be all eventually get up to 2,700 plus calories to be able to come back down to say 2,200 calories and that's an aggressive cut and you lean out and you're more fed than you are now. Yeah. I obviously don't have any problem eating a lot of food or a lot of protein. My biggest fear was if I were to increase my calories, if I would still have those habits and then I would just be eating, I don't know how many calories, you know, at that point. No, no, but let's, let's pause here for a second because Adam just gave you all the right answers, but I have a feeling you knew that. Yeah. I can't, I knew that's where it's going. I'm just scared to do it. I think. Right. So we got to speak to that. So because I don't think you need the answers. I think you know the answers. I just, yeah, I mean, I just wanted to reassurance, I guess, that to increase the calories, but I'm just scared that I'll be like, Oh, there's a chocolate cake and I want to eat half of it. You know what I mean? And then I'm eating like 3,500 calories. Yeah, let's talk about that because you're like, I want to get stronger and build muscle, but I want to micro dose a GLP one. Do you? I know, it's like an oxymoron. Well, not just that, but do you see the conflict that's happening there? Yeah. So let's speak to that for a second. Okay. You want to build muscle because you know that's the right answer. Yes. Okay. But the, but you're scared. Yeah. Because you feel like you're going to go off the rails. Yes. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to help you here. Okay. Because you're probably not going to go off the rails. Yeah. You might a little bit at first because you might be, and correct me if I'm wrong, Kristen, but you might be the kind of person that keeps yourself in check with lots of pressure and shame. Probably. Yeah. Cause I feel guilty about it. And then I'm like, Oh, I'm not going to eat as much tomorrow and then I just eat the same amount of food. And so that's been your MO for a little while. And so what happens is you're like, if I let go of that, what's going to happen? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll tell you what's going to happen. You might go off a little bit. You might test it a little bit. But then you're going to find that it's actually quite freeing. And what you, and part of the reason why you binge, there's the physiological reason, which is what Adam said, and we'll get there. But the other part of reason why you binge is because if you live in that place where you're putting a lot of pre, like you got kids, right? You're tyrannizing yourself. Okay. So and your kids, your kids are young, I'm assuming. Yeah, they're four and five. Okay. But you've been around teenagers. Yeah. Okay. And you're pretty young. Remember when you were a teenager? Yeah. What happens when mom and dad put so much pressure on you? What do you do at some point or what do you want to do at some point? You want to what? You want to rebel? Yes. Yeah. So what you're doing is you're rebelling against your own pressure. That's what the binge, that's part of the reason why you're binging is it's a release of pressure. It's like, Oh God, I live under this tyranny all the time. Let me just let go for a second. And then you do, and then, Oh, right back on the pressure. No, that's truly how I feel. I'm like, Oh, this is great. I'm just eating all this. And I was like, I know I'm going to regret this later. That's right. Yeah. Then the guilt sets in. That's right. So, so part of it is your, your physiologically hungry. Yeah. And then the other part of it is you got to get out of that, that like you got to be okay with. Yeah, you got to stop beating yourself up. Like you got to, you got to stop that. This relationship, if you keep it going, you're always going to be this way. Let me also tell you like a more back to like what's happening to like, so let's say, let's say more to South Point, like, let's say I was coaching you. First thing I do is I move you up to 22, 22, 2300 calories and I were straight training three days a week. You're doing great. You're feeling good, feeling strong. And then all of a sudden you have a day where you, you hit, you do everything, you eat everything normal. And then all of a sudden you also get a big bowl of ice cream too. Guess what's going to happen? Pretty much nothing. You're not going to put a pound of fat on the next day, you'll probably be holding some water. So psychologically, you'll look in the mirror and go, Oh my God, I get it. No, you didn't. You added 500 calories. 500 calories is not a pound of fat. It's not even a half a pound, not even a quarter of a pound of fat. What you'll probably do is end up fueling our strength training workout the next day and you're going to feel strong and have a lot of energy. And, and we get right back on the horse and we keep going. And then we try versus, Oh, I can't wait. I did that. And then the next day trying to restrict more or whatever that or punish yourself like, so that's, and some of this, this is where I think I feel like a lot of our clients that we work with, this is the hardest part. It's like, you get, you know, logically what you're supposed to do. Yeah, having somebody who's there who's kind of remind reminding you like just coaching it's okay. You're giving you the tools to handle it. Yeah. If I were to bump your calories, the place I would bump it is fat 64 is probably too low. Okay. Your proteins great carbs are great. I bet you if you went up to you added 20 grams of fat, maybe a little carbs, calories up 200 calories, I bet you would feel physiologically better. Okay. And if you have a binge, here's what you do. Okay. If you have the binge or that moment or whatever, after you're done, this is what you say to yourself, of course you did that. You under a lot of pressure. Yeah. Of course you did. It's okay. It's all right. We'll try again. Okay. And that's not letting yourself off the hook. Yeah. It's not letting yourself off the hook. What you're doing afterwards, what you're typically probably doing is like you idiot, that's it tomorrow, we're going to really clamp down. That's what's causing more of them. I know. So you got to and I want you to say what I'm saying, because it's not natural, you're going to feel like it's silly and awkward. But you literally say out loud by yourself, you can even write it down. That's another way you can do it. Be like, of course you did this. Yes, a lot of pressure. You got kids, you got a job, and I just beat you up all the time. And so of course you wanted to escape a little bit. I totally get it. We're just going to try again. You got to say that to yourself. Bump the calories, do what I said. I think Maps on a Bulk will be a great program for you. Yeah. Okay. And I think you're going to get great results. Follow it the way it's laid out. Okay. More is not better. If you do anything else, walk. That's it. Yeah. You want to do more stuff. You want to be active or I'm all pro walking. That's good. That's it. But follow the program the way it's laid out. Okay. And then here's the other thing. I'll just ask you a couple of questions before I give you this advice. How's your husband with all this? Does he tell you look good? Is he encouraging? Oh, yeah. And I feel like I look great. Like I have no concerns about how I look. It's, I feel like a lot of it is mental. Like I read the dopamine nation and I was like, I have to figure this out. Like why am I doing this? But he's super supportive. He's like, stop, just enjoy it. I'm like, I'm just going to feel guilty the next day. Like, so, so okay, you got your husband, you love him, you trust them, you bother your children. I want you to lean on him a little bit. And then this, and this what you're telling him, Hey, honey, I need your encouragement. And if you feel like I need to rain things in, I want you to gently talk to me about it because I'm not going to trust myself because I don't, I don't think I'm trustworthy with this for myself. Yeah. And lean on him a little bit. But, but I'd go up in fat, maps and a ball like you're going to be totally fine. But okay. And you think like 200 calories a week, just increase. Yep. Yeah. And see how I do. Oh, you can go higher than that, but we'll start there. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Christian, do you know that we have coaches that do this too? Do you know that? Are you aware of that? Yeah, I just, I had a good coach, but she doesn't have children. And I feel like I was kind of like running in the ground. And if it's going to take time away from my kids, then I'm not doing it to be honest. So you don't need another Christian training you. You need something different. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you're open, we have coaches and I have something I think would work well with what you're, what you probably need. Okay. If you want, I can have somebody reach out and call you. Yeah. I mean, I would love to talk to somebody anymore. Okay. Where I could get so it's only, it's only a single call a month virtually. That's it. It's and they, yeah, that's super low key. I was doing like weekly check-in. Oh, yeah. No, no, no, no, no, it's, it's, it's, you'll get, you'll get plans sent to you and they're really, their goal is to guide you. And then that once a week when you guys get on the phone, check up on how the month went, adjust it. And so it's, yeah, no, we're, we really try and empower our clients to do this stuff. And we don't need to be talking to you every single week, you'll get stuff that you can open up and read and valuable to you. But there's not this like accountability, you need to do this every day type of deal. So measure yourself. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll have someone call you and they can tell you this, but that would sell laid out for you and we'll send you maps and a blog. That's the plan. If you find yourself wanting more guidance and then, and then get with one of the coaches, they'll take good care of you. Okay. Well, thank you guys so much. It was nice to meet you. I enjoy your podcast. All right. Thank you. Okay. Record. Common, very, very common. Yeah. Yeah. Situation. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and, yeah, so tyranny. Oh, yeah. Everybody does it. Yeah. Everybody does it. And when you do it for so long, you're like, if I don't do this, what's going to happen? Yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. I'm going to go in the other direction. Yeah. When the reality is the reason why you have these little breaks of whatever you want to call it discipline or is because you're trying to escape. You're clamping down so hard. Yeah. It's like, I need to get away from this. You know, it's like a relief. I mean, five, seven, 140 pounds is good weight. No, she's fit, dude. Yeah, she is. She's fine. If she just wants to lean tone, you know, what like she used to build, she needs to build muscle and she didn't build no, and she just went up to 1900. So that's what she was probably at 16. Yeah. And, and that much activity. Oh yeah. And then, and then you're already doing the whole, you know, restricting on yourself and tyrannizing yourself. And, but you're, what you're feeling is that your body needs it. And the other part that when you speak to is this GLP one, uh, situation where, uh, there are definitely situations where it's valuable. And then there's situations where I don't think it's appropriate. And this is one of them. It's not appropriate. And it may give short-term success, but it is not going to solve the root issues. No, I mean, she could take a GLP one and drop down to 130 pounds and eat 1100 calories a day. That's what we do. Yeah. If someone who's only eating 1900 takes a GLP one, she'll be lucky to eat 1100 calories and she'll drop five to 10 pounds, but she'll lose almost all muscle. She'll be terrible. It'll be good. Yeah. Our next color is Adam from California. What's up, man? How you doing? Hey, thanks for having me on guys. I feel like I'm obligated to glaze you boys. Go ahead, brother. Go ahead. I know you guys hear it all the time, but, uh, as somebody who has been in business a long time now, like I truly do believe like what you guys do is the highest form of entrepreneurship, um, and really helping people solve like what are maybe the most serious problems, right? And so just kudos to you, man. You deserve all your success. And, you know, I pray for nothing but success for you guys in the future as well. Um, and then PSA to anybody that's listening, like, you know, these guys know what they're talking about. I, I was skeptical. I went to, uh, I finally got to a point where I was like, you know, I'm just going to prioritize protein. I'm just going to hit my 200 grams of protein every day. I'm going to see what that does and like literally every aspect of my life is better. Like drop in fat, feeling, I feel amazing. Uh, I usually, you know, I go to bed. I'm sore. I've been, I've been usually just after a long walk through my hilly neighborhood with the dogs and my legs are killing me. And I wake up every morning like I've been on vacation for a week. Like I feel amazing. That's great. And so, uh, just appreciate you guys. My question's not so much about me. I feel like I'm doing great. And, um, it's about my son, uh, Ethan. He is going to be 14 here in July. Um, you know, he's, he, I was an athlete. He's an athlete. My daughter's an athlete. He focuses on baseball. Um, and he's a very skilled player. He's, he's a late, I was a late bloomer, um, developmentally. Um, we think he's just started puberty like right now. So this is actually the first year he's, he's on a, uh, a pretty good travel, uh, program right now. It's the first year baseball's been hard for him. Like we're facing kids that six, 12 inches taller than him. Uh, geez, on Sunday, we faced a 280 pound kid that was like a mile an hour praising and, uh, his plan was cause he's a young eighth grader right now. His plan was to do a hold back year. And he's such a social guy that as we got closer to having to make that decision, he was, he was like, you know, I'm going to go to high school next year. I don't want to, I don't want to be away from my friends. And so we kind of turned our focus to, oh, right, man, you got to get more athletic. You got to get stronger and, and you kind of got to get after it, right? And he was down to do that. And so let me tell you what we got him doing right now. Um, we got him, he's five, four, 155 pounds. He's, he's, he's got some pudge on him, some baby fat and things like that that he's working through. Um, he definitely needs to get stronger, faster, leaner, um, more agile, just more athletic in general to be able to compete, uh, in high school next year. Um, and he's, he's getting after it. So right now we've got him at a, our target is 150 grams of protein a day. So that may be a little high. That may be, you know, right around the ballpark. Um, he's doing a, you know, for speed, he's doing hill sprints a few days a week. He, he obviously practices all the time. Um, and then for strength, um, I've got him focused, uh, like trying to keep it simple. He's doing farmer carries to everything he's doing twice a week, farmer carries, he's doing deadlifts, um, for, uh, chest. He's doing, you know, one day we're doing flat bench, the next, the next, uh, chest workout we're doing incline dumbbell press. Um, we, I've got him doing front raises for shoulders. I do have him doing military press the shoulder stuff we're doing like once a week because he throws so much, um, for baseball. Um, and then yet I'm just, I'm looking for, for guidance from you. I, I, I would say that his, I'm feeding him a lot of lean cuts right now. And so I am worried that he's underfeeding. Um, he's probably between 1700 and 1900 calories every day. Um, and I'm wondering if, if we should boost that up by giving him fattier cuts of meat, um, primarily. And then, you know, my thought is because he's young, he's able to recover so quickly, uh, that as long as we keep the weight relatively light and focus on his form that he should be able to crush volume. He should be recovering pretty quickly. Um, but again, you know, I, I didn't start lifting until, you know, I started playing football in high school. It was a, it was a different world. It was a ton of volume, a ton of, you know, just heavy lifting. My focus right now, one is everything we do. I want to make sure it's safe. I don't want to cause any problems for him, of course. Um, and then two, you know, I want to maximize, you know, his ability to, to get more athletic and, and be able to compete with confidence as he, uh, kind of reaches the next stage of his athletic career. So, um, I want to hear you guys out. I know you guys are all athletes. Uh, Justin, I know you, you fellow, fellow college football player, um, would love to hear your perspectives. That's really good. So there's really good data now that we didn't have, uh, back in the day on, young athletes and what, uh, contributes to their performance later on the most. It's really, really good data. Uh, but before I talk about that, is he enjoying all this stuff? He is. He's really getting into it, man. Like his YouTube algorithm now, when I check it, it's all fitness stuff. It's all exercise stuff. It's rad. Cause that's number one, number one. He's so young, you know, you want to make sure he, uh, he's developing a good relationship with it. He likes it. Otherwise you'll run into the like, you know, scenario where the kid gets pushed and then later on they're like, I don't want to do this anymore type of deal. The second thing, and this is the most important thing to focus on with a young athlete, especially one whose body is going to be changing rapidly. Uh, his body awareness and kinesthetic ability more important than anything because so the, the brain is extremely plastic at younger ages. So a good example of this is like learning new languages. Like if you and I learn a new language right now, no matter how well we learn it, we're always going to have an American accent no matter what, but you teach a kid four different languages when they're young, they'll be able to speak all four of them as adults fluently. And that's cause the brain has an ability when you're younger that you essentially lose when you're older. It's this, this, this plasticity and this also extends to body awareness and kinesthetic ability. So what you learn when you're younger, uh, with body awareness will last and improve your athletic performance later. So here's what the data shows. Let's say you've got a kid that's really gifted a baseball. Okay. And let's say we could like duplicate that kid and, and on one end we take them and we just focus on baseball because they're good at it. And that's where we place all of our time and energy. And then they get to college and then, and then they, you know, play at that level. Let's say in the other hand, we take this kid who loves baseball, he still plays baseball, but we also have him run, do gymnastics, do swimming, play golf, soccer. So he's just doing a lot of different things up until he's probably a sophomore in high school. Then he focuses on baseball. He's going to be better at baseball than the kid that focused all his time on baseball because of that, that general body awareness. Okay. So that's the most, it's even more important than getting him strong at a particular lift. It's more important. So variety is the name of the game, uh, when it comes to your kid, uh, not getting him hurt, very, very important. As long as he loves it, it's great. Strength training is good for that. And, and his body on top of that is changing so rapidly that body awareness becomes even more important because let's say he's really good at, you know, throwing a baseball right now. And then in three months, he gains an inch in height, which could totally happen. His body is totally different now. Now his mechanics are off and it's going to be weird. It's like when you see a puppy grow real quick and it's kind of awkward. And we've seen that, we've seen that he's grown an inch in the last two months. And, you know, he, he does pitch and his control has suffered through that process. So it makes a lot of sense. So it's all about body awareness and variety. I love the carries. You know, the traditional exercise are good too, but have them do lots of, of different things and get used to his body. Body weight movements seem to be better at low suspension trainer. So like, uh, they call closed chain movements. So like bench press is great. Pushups might be better. Overhead press is good. Shoulder, uh, you know, handstand pushups might be better. So that, so you want to kind of look at that kind of stuff. Suspension trainer is great. Genastic style exercises are good. And kind of like these, these like, like full body type movements are better. Multi-planar type stuff for sure. Uh, and honestly, um, you know, going through this with that type of a, an age range for me, like exposing them at the compound lifts, it's got to be very minimal, uh, and hyper focused. So, you know, their mechanics are, are everything with that. So, you know, like our 15 programs, I was thinking like performance 15, you know, just taking that sort of protocol, but then, you know, the days in between where he does his skill sessions and he's working on speed, one thing that's the, one of the most, uh, important skills of basically any athlete is to his speed. Speed is going to carry them so much further than, than most attributes. And you get speed by getting strong. And then, you know, we apply acceleration to that. Uh, and so to be able to have, you know, uh, the ability of body control, you know, moving different planes, you know, get exposure to all those variables, like Sal's talking about, it's like super important. So, you know, but light doses of compound lifts, uh, to really build up that baseline strength is going to be really important. But like, uh, the mistake I made and mistake a lot of athletes I've worked with make, or they overdo that and they do really long sessions. They do hour long to two hour long, or they do it like four or five times a week. Uh, I would reduce that down to like maybe two to three, but like only two to three like compound lifts on those days, two extra says on the days and that's it. So, it'd be like a 15 protocol, but just like twice a week. Uh, and then the rest of it is all just, you know, field work and speed work. So that, I mean, that would be my suggestion. Yeah. I'd send over maps, 15 performance to them. Uh, and then you could use those first of all, does he play, does he, is he another sports too, or is it just a baseball he's into? You know, he was, he played basketball and soccer and then, you know, once he was done with his 12 year old seasons, he really just wanted to focus on baseball. So it was kind of his call. We kind of pushed him to do other things and try to get him into flag. He's going to be huge, right? So I'm like, you know, football is always there. Um, but you know, he just, he loves baseball and that's what he wants to focus on. We did a really cool interview years ago. Uh, it was Chad Wistley Smith. Yes. You'd love it. It's all about like, we go into deep, the whole thing is about childhood, like sports and sports development, uh, from beginning to end all the way to the professional level, what the ideal kind of programming and volume and all that looks like really, really good. I'll have Doug look up what episode number it is and I'll give it to you. Um, you'll, you'll enjoy that conversation. But the guys are right. Like, um, the, the, the amount of like strength training, like traditional deadlift squatting, like movements like that is actually pretty minimal. And you're doing, your mindset is right. Like mechanics is that we're like just teaching them good form and strength. And if he gets a little bit stronger in it, great. But just don't fool yourself because he's so young and can recover. Well, doesn't mean we want to do a bunch more with him. Uh, as far as strength training is concerned, he'd be far better off doing speed, agility type of work and multi-planer stuff and working on being quicker and picking up a basketball still and playing basketball. Like those things will serve him and baseball actually even more than hyper focusing on that hype. And Chad Wistley Smith goes through this. You do start to hyper focus, but not till later in his career early on diversity wins diversity in sports, diversity in his movement patterns and that is like, that's a lot of what you want going on. More of that, the better. Um, you, we didn't touch this, but you were, I think you're already alluding to the right thing with his diet. Uh, definitely bump fattier meats. Like he for sure, he for sure can handle more calories. Uh, and I would put, and that's an easy way to do it. Let him enjoy tri tip and rib eyes and go, go that, you know, chicken thighs, go that direction. Um, for sure, for more calories and higher fat. But, uh, yeah, 952 is the episode. So episode nine, wow, was that long ago? It's crazy. Yeah, definitely have to like soft more year, like really start like increasing that intensity and like adding that baseline foundation strength with compilates will be, will be great. So three sports that are really good at, um, kind of full body awareness and can, can aesthetic ability would be like wrestling. Uh, Brazilian jiu-jitsu is another one. Rock climbing is another one. And so, and now this wouldn't be where he would spend his time, like really trying to be the best. It would be fun. So wrestling might be difficult because if he goes and wrestles in school, you know, wrestling coaches are pretty damn intense. So that's a difficult one. But if like jiu-jitsu, he might go to Brazilian jiu-jitsu once or twice a week. Uh, that's really good for body awareness. Rock. And you've shown interest in that stuff. I think, I think that's, uh, that's a great idea and something that we can offer, offer for him. Perfect. So that would be great, right? Cause it's great for body awareness. Yeah. It's athletic. It's different than baseball. You got to learn how to move and use your body differently. It's very similar to wrestling. A lot of hip power and rotation stuff too. It's just really, it's the body awareness dude. That's everything. And then, and then rock climbing is the other one is like, Hey, you want to have fun? You want to try doing some rock climbing or whatever. But if he's interested in jiu-jitsu, I bet you, you know, uh, and I don't know how much, how much practice he's doing with baseball, but like one or two days a week at jiu-jitsu would just make him a better athlete. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. You're doing good though, bro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of it, but we'll send over the, the 15 performance. So you got that. Listen to that episode. 952. 952. Yeah. 952. Chad Wesley Smith. And then, uh, and then, yeah, I think literally like if you could get him in jiu-jitsu once or twice a week, he'd be rad. Yep. Yeah. Awesome guys. Appreciate you so much, man. Thanks guys. Thank you. Yeah. That was a long time ago. That episode, first of all, when I talk about it, it makes perfect sense, but I didn't think that. Yeah. So when he said that to me, it was like, you know, it's like one of those moments of light bulb goes off. Like, of course. Well, yeah, of course that's the best thing. It's funny. I just thought of him because, um, I was kind of constructing a bit of a plan for some, some athletes to an athlete's at my son's school. And you know, Chad Wesley Smith, I actually got involved, I think in his kid's school, he's like, the head coach for their football team and they're just crushing. Yeah. They're like, breaking records and I mean, he implemented like his entire, uh, protocol and workouts. I was wondering what he's been up to. We haven't talked to him in a long time. Yeah. I mean, he's a juggernaut training, which is a great. So he still does that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I hadn't popped up in my feed in a long time. I wasn't sure if they were still doing it or what. It's so counterintuitive, right? You think, oh, my kid's gifted. I'm just going to focus all time. So counterintuitive. This one's work. Yeah. And it's just not how the brain, uh, well, and you hear examples of this, right? It's like you have, uh, you know, a tiger woods, you know, who's three years old, he's focused on, and they just focused his whole life on that. And he becomes this group, one of the best golfers ever. So it seems logical. Like, oh, of course the more time I spend doing this, the better I'm going to be. But, uh, it, when he breaks it down for, and this is where our trainer brings it goes like, of course, when it cuts, like, and also you want studies are good because it's, it's, they're looking at large sample sizes, general performance, what seems to work best? Cause obviously tiger woods, serene, the Williams and sister, those are like phenoms. Yeah. I mean, Tiger Woods even had to change his entire swing because of the repetitive overuse injuries. Well, and, and who knows what it like, cause here, what we see right now in professional sports is what is this playing out like classic examples, Patrick Mahomes. Patrick Mahomes was a superstar baseball player and football player. And if you watch the way he can, he can contort his body and throw the ball like nobody, nobody has been able to. And so you're starting to see these kids that are, that grew up understanding this philosophy and they have a, a total edge. And so it's, it's evolving sports, but we, we, we talk about players like Tiger Woods, like Michael Jordan, this science hadn't came up yet. And so it was like, it knows how much better, exactly how much better would Michael Jordan have been or how much better would Tiger Woods have been if he actually diversified that younger, you know what I'm saying? But still kept playing golf, but diversified it more. Who knows? He might even been in better when he was. Our next caller is Brandon from Oregon. Brandon, what's up dude? What's happening? Hey guys, how's it going? Good, how can we help you? Well, I'll, I guess what I'll do is I'll probably just read my question that I sent in. Cause if I don't, I'll either miss some details or I'll get long winded and talk forever. So I sent in, I said, Hey guys, I'm looking for some guidance and clarification on my training and nutrition. I'm currently 34 years old, six foot and I'm about 215 pounds. I don't know my exact body weight or a body fat percentage, likely mid twenties, but my goal is to get down around 15%. For context, I've been lifting since I was about 14. I've mostly followed the traditional body building or bro split where I'm doing, you know, one muscle group per day, five to six days a week. As I've gotten older, I've started to feel like this amount of volume might be too much. And mentally, I started to struggle dialing it in or dialing it back as I feel like I'm not doing enough on a daily basis. I worked with a virtual coach for about 18 months and made solid progress going from about 230 pounds down to 200. While, while I was improving my body composition, I was lifting very high volume, six to days, six days a week, eight to nine exercises per session, usually four sets each muscle or four sets each lift. And I was doing 30 to 40 minutes of incline treadmill walking. I was eating around 2400 calories a day, extremely high protein, about 280 grams of protein a day, 64 grams of fat and 180 grams of carbs. After about a year, I burnt out. I struggled with adherence, especially with nutrition at night. I eventually fell off the plan. I've always had difficulty sticking to strict nutrition and tend to look for instant results. I started with body dysmorphia and being overly hard on myself, which makes consistency challenging. This has been my biggest hurdle for as long as I can remember. I never give myself enough credit and I'm probably the most inpatient person I know. All this combined with an intense sweet tooth and bad habit of binge eating junk food in the evenings, especially ice cream, has made it incredibly hard for me to be where I'd like to be. I struggle with all or nothing mentality where I feel like I have to be perfect or I'm feeling. So when I fall off the meal plan for even one meal or a day, I tend to derail completely. Going back to my previous nutrition plan, I wondered if my calories were too low and not balanced well enough, specifically my protein. I've also questioned whether under-eating for my training volume contributed to burnout and nighttime overeating or if this was more of a mental thing. My mind tells me that it's a mental thing because it tends to be my sweet tooth that gets me in trouble in the evenings. Right now, I'm coming off of a hernia repair, which has given, you know, it's put me out of lifting for about a month, which I do feel like maybe has given me an opportunity to reset and rebuild smarter. Looking ahead, I'm hoping to join my local police department, hopefully where I'll soon be working 12-hour shifts that'll make gym sessions difficult. So I'd like to transition to a more sustainable plan, ideally lifting four days a week with a good balance of strength, training, and mobility. In the past, I've really enjoyed lifting heavy, especially squats, deadlifts, and bench. Over my lap of recovery and mobility, I believe has endured my progress and led to some persistent tightness and discomfort throughout my body. I truly believe it was because I didn't and still don't do much mobility work in my routine. So my main question is, while I do focus mostly on whole foods and hitting a protein target, I'd like to know what you guys recommend my caloric intake be regarding my training volume or an appropriate training volume, I should say. And I have not, I mean, I've listened to you guys for about six months, maybe a little more than that, and I've finished a ton of episodes. I've heard all about all your guys' maps program, but I have not actually purchased one yet because I was like, I don't know exactly which program would be ideal for me specifically. So I was hoping maybe some guidance on that, something that maybe balances strength and mobility, recovery, and just, you know, long-term sustainability for me. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit first about your 280 grams of protein and only 60 grams of fat. You must be eating tilapia or tuna and chicken breast and ground lean turkey. Is that, but is that the diet or what? Pretty much. And I think that that's part of the reason why I strove to adhere to it after a while. Of course. Of course. The same boring bland food. And I was like, I tried to spice it up, but you know, it's, it's hard to do that. Bro, a chicken thighs, have some chicken thighs, have some rib eyes, enjoy a tri tip every now and then. Yeah. Your protein would be better if you brought it down to like 230, added 50 grams of carbs, and then added like 30 grams of fat. Your calories need to be up higher too. You should be up to like 27, 200. Your intuition is on point, by the way. Everything that you're feeling is, is because you've been over-training underfed. And that includes your lack of mobility. You know, it's not like you need to do more. It's your body stiff and over-trained. Yeah. So yeah, you got it. So training wise, very easy, maps on a ball, it could be a great place to go. Bump your calories, your protein's really high. You don't need to be that high. 220 grams, 230 grams would be plenty. Yeah, I've since dropped it since I was that high. If you just, if you just, if you just switch the meats out to the higher fat meats, it'll take care of both. Yeah. If you literally get rid of the ground turkey bullshit in the, in the chicken breast and switch for chicken thighs and, and rib eyes or ground beef, it'll bump the calories and it'll lower the, it'll lower the protein, increase the fats. You know, I, I, I, I, it's so rare that I find a guy your size who can do well on anything less than 80 grams of fat. It just doesn't work. It feels like crap and it causes binging. Yeah. Well, and I, I can't say that I've felt great throughout the entire, I mean, there was days over, and weeks even when I'm like, I feel like I'm just dragging and I was like, I don't know if that's overall volume in the gym. I'm just over trained or under fed or combination. Both. And then, right. Yeah. And then the more I listen to you guys, I'm like, man, it's gotta be, it's gotta be a combination of both. Bro, you'll feel so different in like two weeks. If you bump your calories and your fats, do maps on a ball, like that's your strength training, three days a week. That's it. Nothing else. If you want to walk, if you want to do mobility in between, then go for it. And that's it. And your, and your body composition is going to change. And be patient. Cause going through that, your, your body has been used to getting beat up with that much volume and underfed that. So it'll take a second for you to kind of recalibrate. So I was telling somebody when I switched this is like, if you trust us, trust the process. But that, that is the plan. The plan is a maps, anabolic three day a week program, a great program to follow up that would be performance. It will draft some of your mobility stuff that you're talking about. Perfect for police academy too. So a great, it goes maps and a ball, then go to mass performance right after that. And then the, and then the cal, literally the way, like I wouldn't even overthink the calories to be honest with you. It would literally be cut out all this extra lean meat and just switch it out for higher fat meats. And it'll take care of bumping your calories and take care of your healthier fats and you'll be more satiated and you'll feel better. You're just asked for, we'll probably go up to you. Yeah. All those things. So that's funny, brought it up. So I, I just had my testosterone, my total T was down to two 90. Yeah. Yeah. Low fat. That's normal when you're underfed, over trained, not enough fat. And I bet your sleep is probably crappy too, because it's hard to sleep well when you're underfed and over trained. It's probably so. So yeah, your testosterone will go way up just from doing those things. Yeah. I mean, so that like the things that I'm like, I'm coaching you through this process, because it will take a time for your body to recalibrate. It's like, how is your sleep? How is your libido? How's your recovery? And those are our three first markers and then strength, right? So those are the four things that we're kind of like talking about. I'm not really tripping about weight. I'm not even really hyper focusing on calories. It's like, I'm switching out all those lean meats to higher fat meats, letting you enjoy yourself and be fed when you want. And when you're, if you're hungry, go eat, but just make good choices eat to, you know, go eat another serving of the rib eye and rice or whatever, like that just that's your body probably telling you it needs more fuel because it's trying to build and trying to build strength. And so, but those are the things that we're looking at. We're like, how's libido, how's energy, how's recovery, how strengthening the gym. Let those be your guide. Once you start checking off all those saying, yeah, that feels good. Yeah, that feels good. Yeah, that feels then comes the composition. That's right. Then all of a sudden, muscle starts packing on, waistline starts coming in, but focus on those four as your guiding principles of like what you need to be focused on. And then the other shit follows right behind that. If I just again, just for the testosterone, because you're probably like, what the heck, man, you know, that's the scary thing. If I were to give a man three steps to crush his testosterone, here's what it would look like over trained, under eat, too low fat, a guaranteed to destroy your testosterone. Yeah. So you're hitting everything on the head. Like I don't sleep all that well. I mean, some days I go and I'll go a week, I'm doing okay. I track it and it's usually high seventies, low eighties. So it's like, it's not awful, but it's not optimal. I wake up every night, like at two o'clock on the dot and I'm just awake for like an hour. Yeah, stress, dude. Yeah, it's too much, too much, too much stress on the body with the exercise, not enough eating and not enough fats. Your body's hurting. Here's what you'll notice right out the gates. More energy, better sleep and you're stronger and recovery and recovery. And then what Adam's saying, trust and then stick with it because then you'll start to see the strength gains and then you'll start to see the body composition change, which takes a little longer. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Once all four of those are in line because you're doing all those things, then you'll see, you'll be good. Yeah. Then it's then we'll be rocking and rolling, but just trust the process. It is not a calorie thing, dude. Like obviously if you go and eat like an asshole, like I say, and you start binging 4,000 calories, that's not going to serve us. But if you, if you're hungry and you eat and you eat whole natural food, you're good. And I don't care if it's a fattier cut of meat with a, with a good carbohydrate, rice, potatoes, sweet potato, yeah, like stuff like that. Go for it. Yeah. Eat it. Eat it because you're hungry. That means your body is, it's, it's rebound, it's recovering, it's rebuilding, it's wanting to build muscle, like you'll be fine and it, but just trust that process. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'll do that. We'll send over maps, anabolic. And then like I said, after anabolic, follow it up with performance. Okay. Perfect guys. I think, thank you so much. I appreciate your time and, and everything you guys do. It's great. Thank you. You got a man. I swear to do, I swear to God, bro. The, the, the ultra low fat sources of protein. I knew it. It was, it was like 280 grams with the weight. He's eating, yeah. That's boiled chicken breast dude. That is chicken. That is chicken breast, extra lean ground turkey, tilapia, that's your, yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to say this right now, like those ultra lean, super lean cuts of meat, if that's when that should not be, not even close to a predominant source of your, of your animal sources of protein, unless you're a competitor and you're 12 weeks out and you're measuring everything, if that's usually what you eat for your protein, oh my, your life sucks. You feel like crap. You're not able to recover. Your hormones are probably off. Like, like just eat, just eat the meat. Now I'm not talking about going like, you know, 60% ground beef or, you know, eating sausages all the time, but like chicken thighs, uh, you know, regular ground beef, tri-tip, rib eye, occasional ripe, fat. Yeah. You need it. Essential. Our next caller is Farron from Ontario. Hi Farron. How you doing Farron? Hello. Hi. How are you guys? Good. How can we help you? Good. Sorry. I'm sitting on the floor because I was having issues using my computer, so I'm on my, on my phone. So that's all right. That works. I'm going to read my email. I did shorten it a little bit just for sake of brevity, but I think it has all the information that you'll need. So, hello. My name is Farron. I'm a 38 year old stay at home mom. I have two little boys and over the past three years, I've lost more than 30 pounds through cardio, macro tracking, and then eventually strength training. Along the way, I also fell into a cycle of over-training, restriction, and body dysmorphia, but after working with a coach to rebuild a healthier relationship with food and training, I'm now in a much better place, but I'm unsure how to move forward with my goals. So a little bit of background. I started my fitness journey in 2023 when I bought a popular spin bike and began doing classes at home every day. My youngest son was utterly confused and kept asking why I was riding a bike and not going anywhere. And he was right because he lost 15 pounds and then stopped going anywhere. I plateaued really quickly. That's when I found the carbon diet coach. I started tracking macros, dialed in on calories, started eating enough protein, and then the weight began to drop off again. So at that time, I also started strength training and I gradually built up a home gym, and by the fall of 2024, I had reached my lowest weight of 122 pounds and 19% body fat. So I looked slim, but I didn't have the physique I wanted. So I kept pushing harder, strength training five days a week, doing cardio almost every day, and then fell into just a cycle of dysmorphia and restricting and binging. I felt awful and I knew something needed to change. So I'd been listening to you guys for a little while and I decided to hire a coach. She helped me rebuild balance. She increased my calories from 1800 to 2400 reduced my training to three days a week and told me I could do cardio, but it was optional, not mandatory. So my weight went up and stabilized at 134 pounds and I felt really great. So at my request, we ran an eight week cut last fall so I could practice doing it in a more sustainable way. I reached 127 pounds, but I felt really crummy and I was really hungry, so I returned to maintenance. And that's where I've been ever since. So now my weight has stayed the same. I'm probably about 22% body fat, 2200 calories a day, 130 to 140 grams of protein, three or four strength days. I do one lower, one upper, and two full body days. I use the second full body day as optional, so I don't force myself to do it, but I do complete it most of the time. And I trained at home with the home gym, I home school, my kids, and I run our household. So I'm pretty active during the day. But my main struggle now is my lower body. So my upper body slims out really easily, and then I carry most of my body fat around my hips and glutes. And I have cellulite, which I hate, even at my lowest body weight. I still had cellulite. So my coach explained that achieving the look I wanted would require a level of restriction that probably wasn't going to be sustainable for me long term. And I understand that, but at the same time, I do want to continue to improve my physique. So my question for you guys is, is it realistic for me to continue improving my lower body composition while eating maintenance, or would pursuing this goal likely require a deficit that risks pushing me back towards unhealthy habits? How can I focus on building more muscle in my lower body through adjusting my training structure? Or is this mostly a matter of genetics and just false expectations for women? The biggest win for me over the last year has been rebuilding a healthier relationship with food and training. So protecting that progress is really important to me. Thank you for everything you do. I've learned a lot from your show, and I would really value your perspective. First of all, you look great. You're doing a great job. And you're doing a great job. That's first and foremost. I'm curious to what, do you know what your squat, deadlift numbers are? How strong is your lower body? Tell me. Yeah, so I have been gradually building my home gym. I just got the courage to buy a barbell and a squat stand for myself. So I got it home. Yesterday, I did my first round, I squatted 120 pounds for eight reps. So I've been doing that. And then like, I'm still using the program that my coach had me on. So I'm doing like eight, eight, and then 12. So I can do 110 for 12. Farron, you're doing great. Yeah. And your trainer was your coach did a good job. It's actually rare that I hear someone on here telling me about a coach and I think they did well. I think your coach did a really good job with you. I think you're doing great and you need to cut yourself some slack. I think you're too hard on yourself. Yeah. I know. But no, but you're doing really well. Body fat percent of 20% 22%. I'm going to tell you right now, you're going to feel your best and be your healthiest between 22 to 25% for the rest of your life. That's where you're going to want to sit. You're at the right body fat percentage. I think you'll obtain the look when we build more muscle in your legs. And I think that you're just now starting squatting. This is your first time barbell squatting a year, a year from now, a year from now, your lower body is going to look radically different after squatting and deadlifting for a year. You're fine. Yeah. Yeah. You could get away with bumping your calories about 200 more calories just so you don't, I think it would be better. So I would, I would feed you a little bit more and I would try and get strong in the squat and the deadlift like, uh, let's keep going and watch what your lower body ends up shaping up. And honestly, I want your body fat percentage about where it's at. I don't really want to get, but it'll look different when we put five to 10 pounds of muscle on that body. That's right. It's going to look way different. That's right. So I think the look that you're trying to achieve in the lower body will come from squatting for the next squatting and deadlifting for the next year and getting strong there and eating up, eating 200 more calories and kind of hovering where you're at doing what you're doing. Your calories probably be about 24 to 2500 calories through this process and just get strong. And I think four days a week of strength training is okay. You're better off doing three. Okay. So, um, that's, I, I'm not, I don't want to get leaner in a sense that I want to like lose weight or even lose body fat. I'm, I'm happy the way I am in that sense. I would just like more muscular. That's right. I heard that. I heard that. I got that from the message. That's, that's what I'm telling you. That's the prescription. Bump your calories. Uh, do you know how many grams of, uh, I'm assuming you're hitting, I'm assuming you're hitting good protein. Do you know where your, where your fats are at? Uh, yeah. So I, I have, I've religiously tracked, which is another thing that my coach was getting me off of. So I have done times without tracking, but I feel more comfortable tracking. Um, my proteins, yeah, 130 to 140, my fats are between 70 and 80. And then the rest are carbs. You had a good coach, Ferran. Yeah, it's pretty rare to hear about a good coach. Where's the coach, where's the coach from? Uh, so she's now, she works for prime revival. Um, but at the time she, I actually found her through, um, searching on Spotify for a podcast on how to stop tracking macros. Okay. Going crazy with it. And I just started listening to her podcast and then I, um, I added her on Instagram and, and she reached out to me and said, Hey, how can I help you? And it was just a beautiful kind of relationship that we got me into a really good place. Yeah. She's great. If you want to reach back out to her for a little short stint, probably be good, but I bump your calories to 24, 2500 and let's get you strong. The fact that you just started barbell training, that's like, that's like, that's going to unlock a lot of gains for you. The next two years, you're going to see consistent progress and change in your, in your lower body. Just from getting stronger. Just from that. Yeah. Just from that. I'm going to send you maps on a ball. Like that's the program I want you to follow. It's three days a week. It's three days a week. Do that. Yeah. That was my question because, um, I'd like to just maintain my upper body, but I can, I guess I'm a little bit, um, I don't want to over train in volume. If I want my focus to be on my lower body, well, let's do this. Muscle, muscle mommy. I'll give you muscle mommy. It's a little more, it's more lower body focused, very similar maps. Anabolic follow that program, bump your calories to 300. Don't drop them down and let yourself build, build into the look that you want. Don't, don't try to cut into the look that you want. Yeah. No, I'm done with that. It doesn't make me feel very good and it just gets me back into a bad place. And, and, and listen to your body. There's a good chance that, uh, when you start really hitting, your appetite will go up. So don't fight that. If you get hungry, eat, but go eat a good balanced meal. Go have some steak and rice or whatever your favorite meat and rice or yam or sweet potato is, go have a balanced meal, uh, whatever, whatever that is, like feed it. If, if, cause that, that's what I'm like, what I'm listening for, if I'm coaching you, is as we're going through this program, you, you're telling me like, wow, you're feeling strong and you're like, Adam, I'm getting hungry. And I'm like, yes, feed that, then we'll go up again. So if you're not, then we're, you'll be fine with a 200 calorie bump. But even at 2400 calories, if you start getting hungry from lifting this way, that's a good sign. That means you're, you're trying to build muscle. Okay. So, um, is this something that I should focus on for the next, well, I guess forever, at least the next three months, cause the program's three months long. So follow that lay the way it's laid out and with the advice we're giving with calories, and just let the, let the pro, let the program do the work. And I'll tell you this, Farron, if, if you just started barbell training, if you just focused on, you know, smart training and getting stronger for the next two years, that's the best focus. For the next two years, just try to get stronger. Yeah. Be smart about it. You know, don't hurt yourself, but, but just try to get stronger, feed yourself to do so, and you'll get the look that you're looking for. Okay. Yeah. You got a really cool, you got a really cool year ahead of you. You got it. You had a good coaching that sets you up well. You're in a good place right now. That program's going to be incredible for you. And just like Sal said, just you know what, you want to get back on here after you're finished with muscle mommy. Yeah, I'd love to hear where you're at three months. Yeah, that would be really cool. Okay, cool. We're going to send it to you and then, and then reach back out and then we'll do a follow up with you. Okay, perfect. So muscle mommy is good. So I, at home, I have dumbbells, five to 50 pounds. I have a squat stand and barbell and I have a cable tower too. You got everything you need. You're covered. Yep. Okay. Okay. And no, so I've stopped doing cardio. I just don't, that's fine. That's fine. Walk. I don't want to do anything else. Walk, but follow the program the way it's laid out. Any other activity? Walking. Yep. Just walking. Okay. Well, when it's negative 15 here, it's like the seven years of winter that won't end. So, okay. Okay. Thank you so much. This has been, I've been wanting to call in and talk to you guys for a few weeks and months probably. And I finally mustered up the courage to do it and you've given me the reassurance that I hear you say all the time, but it's really nice to hear it directly from you guys and to get positive feedback as well. Awesome. We'll see you in three months. Yeah. Can't wait. Keep it going. Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much. All right, thanks for that. Hey, that never happens where somebody talks about their coach. I'm almost always like, this is going to suck. Yeah. Yeah. They're coaching a great job. Well, listen to how she found her. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That even that podcast episode is not a, that's not a calm, that's a, that's a, obviously a coach has been coaching for a long time to even have a podcast episode titled how to stop tracking macros. Totally. Yeah. Like send her an email. I'd love to get the name of the podcast and find out who this, who this trainer is. That's great. Yeah. No, I definitely. Maybe we'll come a little stealer. Don't work on my thoughts. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. That's awesome. Yep. Look, if you like the show, come find us on Instagram, mine pump media. Thank you for listening to mine pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mine pump media.com. The RGB Superbundle includes maps, anabolic, maps, performance and maps aesthetic nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs with detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos. The RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price, the RGB Superbundle has a full 30 day money back guarantee and you can get it now, plus other valuable free resources at mine pump media.com. 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