The Caloric Value and Limits of Fiber Intake

Yeah, and this also feeds into, I guess, when you are like, you are what you absorb and don't excrete exactly what you said. And this can impact how a calorie deficit on paper isn't actually a calorie deficit at the cellular level. Because if your gut isn't doing what it's supposed to be doing, if you're not excreting, if this is where that whole excess estrogens comes in it's just like it's not your hormones it's the fact your diet is absolutely trash I think it's interesting too like because what's what is the one macronutrient that no one ever thinks about when they calculate out their diet no fiber because you get a lot of nutritious a dietitian going around and go, well, fiber doesn't have any calories. You don't absorb that. You do, you actually do. So, but it's, it's about like 2.1, 2.2 calories per gram. Now, when somebody is eating a normal amount of fiber, that's not a big deal. So we always recommend at minimum, like 10 grams of fiber per thousand calories. Um, optimally, probably 15. It's probably a better, better place to be. But if you think about this, I, we've, I've actually had, we had one client who was eating somewhere around 80 to 120 grams of fiber a day she a naturopath and she read some research showing the benefits of fiber on the gut microbiome and i'm like okay like that's going from that's looking at like 10 grams per thousand and instead of going to like 15 or 20 per thousand you jump to like 70 grams of fiber per thousand calories. Like there's, there's a limit to how much you're, you can handle. And it was crazy because when I first saw her progress, her first initial picks super lean, but she looked like she had swallowed up like a beach ball. She looked like one of those, you know, uh, 42 cents a day, adopt like a, you know, um, an Ethiopian kid. Like it looked like that, like real skinny, but a big, like swollen gut from, um, from all the fiber. So if you look at that, if she was eating a normal, let's say 20 grams, 20 grams of fiber. Okay. So we've got like what, 40, 45 calories from that, that you're not thinking about, not a big deal. If we go up to say 80, now we're talking about 160 calories that we haven't thought about. And again, you get a woman who's 48, 50 kilos. They don't have a lot of wiggle room. So if they're eating a ton of fiber like that and they're they're processing and making a lot of short chain fatty acids they could actually be creating a higher level of food intake than they actually realize but we never usually think about that type of stuff yeah but it's really important to look at like to zoom out and look at every single element of what you're doing and stop micro focusing on i guess missing the forest for the trees and this kind of can fit into the argument of when people say that they're trying to build muscle but they're only gaining fat or I'm training my legs but my legs gain muscle really fast I don't want to train them that much and the argument that we're gonna now move