The 'Small Fat' Analogy and Body Composition

well the thing is like at the when we first started like you had no muscle to speak of right you were training but you those the pictures you sent me yesterday i'm like wow i because i forgot like because i see you almost every day i'm like i forgot how awful you look back then and you were dieting and training hard now we could have gotten you leaner at that point but what's the point of looking like a fucking coat hanger when it's like you're not gonna like the way you look and i when you talked about that being a smaller version yourself and you've heard me talk about this in class i call it the the jared um it's like the jared analogy jared from subway so you have this really big fat pedophile and he eats six to eight hundred calories of subway and now he's a small fat pedophile like He didn't, if anybody doesn't know, he's in prison now for like pedophile pictures and shit. Good job, Jared. But it's like, it's like people, when they, when they come to train and they want fat loss and all this, they don't have in their mind. Oh, I love the shape I am here. It's 50% body fat. Can you just make me look smaller? um they're they're getting an idea of you know they've seen a victoria swimsuit model or they've seen a bodybuilder they like or a bikini chick or instagram model um and they're like i want to look like that cool we're gonna have to build something that's underneath all that stored energy because if i pull all that off you are not gonna like the way you look um so we have to go through a body composition change what's what's cool about this for gen pop though is in the first especially especially women,

so imperative that they do a lot of weight training the first four to six months, because even if they overeat on their diet, it's pretty much quite clear that you could still overeat your diet. As long as you're lifting weights hard and probably taking care of a little bit of your cardiovascular stuff with some aerobic activity, it's almost impossible for you to put on fat, even if you're overeating a little bit. So these people who are like, oh, you know, I tried everything I did for four or five months of weightlifting. And, you know, I was, I was dieting a little bit and I never lost weight. Bullshit. Your weight might not have changed, but your body composition damn sure would have changed. But I think for a lot of women, that's the hard thing to accept is that if you're doing it right, your weight is not going to drop that much in the first 16 to 20 weeks. But you're going to notice that the composition of what you look like is different. If I take a woman who is eating 40 to 60 grams of protein, which is pretty common. If I put her at 120, 140 grams of protein, she's going to have an anabolic response. Her muscles are going to soak that shit up and grow. If she's combining out four or five hours of weightlifting, she's going to be growing muscle at a massively fast rate as, as fast or even faster than she can lose weight. So in a lot of cases, you might have women that don't lose anything at all the first four or five months, or they may only lose a couple of kilos, but they'll go down two or three dress sizes the only problem is they're so focused on the scale and the gravitational pull of earth on their mass that they can't they can't look at oh uh my circumference measures drop fucking 15 uh 15 centimeters or whatever they don't look at that stuff because they're so obsessed about the scale oh yeah do you remember when i started i wouldn't even get on the scale I made Charlie send the number in my starting weight because I was like, I don't want to look at it. And I think I was 135 pounds, which is roughly where I sit now. But it's completely different. And I tell people all the time, my weight has pretty much sat at 60 kilos for three years. When we started dieting for the wedding this year, I was 62 and a half. I am 64 kilos and I look completely different than I did in May. like it's unreal it's probably a good time to bring up the slideshow i think i think i think you should you should contact marvel and ask them if you could play she-hulk yeah just like from the stills in my video that we went over the one night when i felt fat and you're like okay really really like come on so funny um how do i share my screen you go to hit share screen yeah all right idiot all right here we go so this is Ali's muscle nerd journey oh yeah so that was right before I came to you guys that was at Todd's gym in like September of 2018 that is what 1100 calories will get you if you pose the right way but this was not sustainable so i don't look terrible here now hold on i yeah i just want to say like yeah if you pose the right way look you can and a lot of women will look at this and go i'd love to look like that right um but they also have to understand shadows and angles and understanding how to turn your body for that exactly and that's why that's what i really looked like and the thing i noticed the most is look at, I have like old, old lady, but like my ass was falling. I played college soccer and all of a sudden I'm like, where did my glutes go? Well, you know, it's, it's, I had to take you all. You were taking too much of that medication, no acetal. So once we took you off, no acetal, we can build some glutes, but look, and let's be clear. Look, a lot of women would love to look like this. And so, you know, you, you, this, but this wasn't your vision. This isn't what you wanted to look like and you were struggling, but I'll tell you, like, I've got lots of clients, gen pop clients who would love to look like that. And that's probably, you know, as lean as they'd want to get to and as much as they'd want to get to. So there's absolutely nothing wrong with that, but everybody has their own vision of what they want to look like. And look, it's your life, it's your journey and you know, whatever makes you happy. Yeah. For me, I was like, I want to, you know, have my quads come back. I want to look like Dana Lynn Bailey, like, you know, give it to me so that was my first progress picture with you guys um and that's back when i had boobs too so i got those taken out i'm like oh my god they look huge how much do they weigh uh they're like 0.9 pounds each when i say yeah so about uh what's that 0.2 pounds yeah about a kilo each so you actually replaced that kilo with a kilo of muscle it the best replacement than ever And this is when you can tell how thrilled I am about gaining weight So this was in April of 2019 I think this was like the height of when I was at like 2100 2200. Not happy, but again, not terrible. Man, a testament to you, you put your trust in us. You said, well, we've come this far, I'm not going to quit. Let's just see what happens. You just kept, kept most people in my experience, they would just quit because like, well, this isn't working out. I'm going to go to this other trainer. Who's willing to starve me and fuck me up long-term just so I can be real fucking skinny and, and lean. Yeah, definitely didn't quit. Don't know what I was thinking with my hair at this time, but we'll, we'll ignore that. I'm still gaining weight again. I don't know who let me out like that with my hair but that was right after uh this was after my surgery too so got my implants out so i immediately dropped a couple pounds so that was funny because the scale didn't really budge that much and i was like what the hell i just got like these two massive things out like why didn't it maybe that helium in your implants they might have very much now one thing one thing to notice is you can go back to that last one you can also see now like your face is getting lean though so your face wasn't as profit so you're starting to drop some water and uh what what um i don't know because we didn't run labs back then for this but a lot of cases when people have a lot of stress dieting is stress training is stress not sleeping that type of stuff they can start holding water in their face so that's a clear indicator of possible blood pressures and also cortisol issues when you start getting moon phase. So when people start getting into, again, for lack of a better word, adrenal fatigue syndrome, where they have a lot of different symptoms of chronic fatigue, low hormonal output, especially cortisol, people will tend to hold a lot of water in their face and get what they call moon phase. And also, I never looked at these photos. So I would have Charlie take the photos, and he would upload them to you guys. I didn't want to see them. And then I started taking video when he would travel because I still couldn't look at the photos up until this year when you were like, don't send me a fucking video. I was like, I'm not going to take the screenshots. And actually going through all these old photos was the first time that I've ever done that in my life. So when people think that like fitness professionals have their shit together. No, we just we have just as many insecurities and issues as you guys do. We're way crazier than our clients. We're much worse if they only knew. Oh my God. And I'll tell you one thing on the weight, because then I started had, when you started getting comfortable, I think the best thing ever was when I told you to turn, switch your scale into kilos, because as an, as an American, when you put the scale, the kilos, you, it at least for a small period of time, it fucks up your ability to rationalize your weight because it's a different number. And it, what I've found with people who, who aren't with the rest of the world in the metric system, myself included until I moved overseas, it's, it's a lot, it's, it's, when you see a pound on the scale that you go up a pound, that's kind of scary to a lot of people. but if 454 grams goes up the scale which is the same exact weight it's not as scary because you're like oh a gram is tiny and then i can you know what i remember one of the things i told you i went hold up your water bottle you know how many milliliters is that you know it's 500 grams half a liter okay that's a little over a pound and you look at that and go oh that's not scary at all so a lot of it's switching your brain and saying i'm gonna stop focusing on pounds i'm gonna focus on pounds on my list because it makes it makes it look more impressive but i'm going to look at grams use the metric system for my weight because a it's easier for the calculations when you're calculating things like you know bmrtd all that but also if you lose gain gain 100 200 300 grams it doesn't seem like a big deal so it's a psychological trick oh my god that was like the best thing ever and using the metric system because now that i have international clients i'm like yeah i know what i'm doing it but before i was like i don't know if you suck at math like i do i'm like i don't know what the fucking math is on this like i'm just gonna look at kilos and report this how much i weigh and i didn't do the math forever and it definitely helps not a mind fuck wait until you get somebody from the uk and you don't know what the fuck they're gonna tell you they could be miles kilometers kilograms pounds stone i've had people send me their weight and i'm like bro can you just send this in kilos because now i gotta take that and i gotta multiply that by 14 and I got to do this other and it too much but yeah that was the best part and it actually really cool like after your poop and you like yeah that was like 800 grams of poo It the best part This is when we started reshaping. Cause you could see a difference like in the legs and then bringing the waist in a little bit. Booty's getting perky. Still. Yeah. My, my butt's lifting itself. I don't know how to dress myself that much, but the hair, the hair is still cool. That was like, Oh, I don't even know. I don't even know. It got shorter and it got better. So now butt's coming up higher. No more like saggy sagginess here, which I was very excited about. These were taken via still shot in the video. So these are, you know, first time I was ever looking at this. And then this is a side-by-side of now, this was the summer. The real glow up is the hair because I mean, so, but you can tell a difference like in the glutes and stuff which in the quads like and you would always say like dude look at your quads yeah and i was like wow like that's really cool at that point i knew we had to do some about your hamstrings though uh and i was actually watching your watching your videos from your last workout and i was like holy fucker hamstrings uh i do want to i do want to say i'm gonna have to teach you how to count seconds because those weren't four second essential center deadlift and those those also those also weren't um holds at the top of your hip thrust either so my god my clients will love hearing this because i always needle them about that but hey it's 225 for five so yeah yeah that's all it matters and then um this i had posted this summer because i was talking about weight and when what we're saying before about how you can pretty much look very similar with all different weights and then I added in yesterday so this is 64 kilos so this is what 10 pound difference between here and here and it's really not aesthetically a massive difference but you can tell like I think if you if we did circumference measures because it looks you can tell like your legs your legs are growing now like really starting to grow um and i also want to say like looking at that wedding day picture um yeah for forever and a day you kept telling me i don't want to be fucking veiny and grainy and shit for my wedding i go no you don't we're not we can do that we'll do that after the wedding but i'm not you need to enjoy your wedding to be stressful enough going into the wedding and you need to be able to enjoy it. And if I, if I get you to the point where you're like 12, 13, 14%, and you got veins everywhere, you're going to feel like a hot, steamy dump. So I'm not going to do it. And I didn't get that. If coaches are listening to this, you have to be, you have to be honest with your client and you have to know when to say no, like you wanted to get to that level. I went, no, I'm putting my foot down. I'm not going to do it. I'll get you lean. You'll look very good. We're going to focus on making your back look awesome in your dress, but I'm not going to take you down to the point where you look like death and feel like death when you should be enjoying your wedding we can do that after the wedding yeah and and i was so grateful that you did that because leading up to it i think it was the week before i was like oh man had we had we gone down the road that i wanted to i would not have enjoyed that process and it was so nice to enjoy the time just leading into it because it is so stressful too on top of that it's not like you know just a photo shoot and now our goal is a photo shoot yeah i mean i fuck i mean zoe and i got married um february 2nd 2020 and i remember and i it was stressful for me and i didn't have to do anything like she took care of everything because i'm only good at this shit yeah i'm a wreck at everything else so zoe zoe's does everything and uh and i i was able to you know do the same thing you did i wanted to look good at my wedding So I did a combat and I just done a jujitsu comp too. So I was looking, I look like a fucking weapon. But that was even going to, it was stressful as shit. Cause you got to pack all your shit. Like you guys had to fly. We had to drive a few hours away. You know, I've got my mom's coming in. My niece is coming in my family from New Zealand. Like it's fucking stressful. And then the whole wedding is like, you, you're so busy all fucking day. And then you get to hang out for like two hours. So I, if I being in that made me more empathetic of saying, look, you're not going to want to do that. I know that's what you think you want, but you're going to, you're going to thank me for not actually taking you to that level because we can always do that after this in a photo shoot. Right. Which we will in December, I will be veiny and grainy. But the mission was accomplished with the back because I had a veil and it was literally when I put my dress on in the bridal suite that we all like you can wear that no like it covers your back absolutely no who the fuck wears the veil one of my friends made me buy it I was like I don't want to wear that shit this isn't fucking Victorian England and shit man you know and so now we have day one and then mid mid journey this because it's never ending it's it's a lifelong process but you know the quads are coming back i'm just so excited it might i'd rather have pecs than i think too like it's it's it's all cool to look at the physical transformation but i think it's really the mental and psychological transformation as well because i um that first pick there's no way if i told you oh i'm going to take up to 65 kilos you would have fucking lost your shit oh my god and to to be like 64 on the scale and be like yep there we go and like i would i was laughing like the day i think i hit 63 i was like i had that minor panic attack but then we watched our videos or my videos and i was like oh like you're an idiot and then i did a dexa scan last weekend which showed that my body fat was 17 so clearly I haven't been rapidly gaining fat as my brain would think. And then I think my, I last tested my RMR four or five years ago, it was 1400 and it was 1700. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it said, what did it say with your activity is some like 2100. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, you know, it's amazing. And this is the backs, you know, that we had posted to that, that was the goal for the wedding dress to have that. And I remember this was in like Charlie's old house and I had crash dieted. I was like, you see how soft to me, not to everyone else, but to me, I could tell how soft I was. I was a smaller version of who I was. I didn't want to, I wanted this. And we were worried that the dress would not fit. And that was right before one of the other wedding dates. And then you guys just turned me into a machine. And now I'm heavier on this side then I am on the left on the left I think I was like 60 point something and I think this is like 60.7 or 61 which again completely different I could be the same weight too and then it would be the same but but yeah that's like huge with the the mental side of it is that if you if you trust your coach and you know that they're also not going to let you get to a point where you're going to look sloppy and you might think in your mind you might look different but they're not going to let you get to a place that that you're not going to enjoy I guess would be the right word I mean granted in the beginning we had to go there but you had prefaced that and you had told me that and educated me about it but I mean to be able to gain weight yeah you might have to get to a point where you don't feel very comfortable but to me it's like well if we're starting at a for starting at a level where you already don't feel comfortable and you actually want to change it's an uncomfortable process because we may have to you may have to not feel very good in your skin um and it's that's why so many people it's hard for them to do it um because they just don't want to get to that level of well i'm just gonna wear fucking sweats all the time because i just don't i just don't like the way i look and and you think that everyone else cares what you look like nobody gives a fuck like when you're out of when you're out of shape nobody gives a fuck but when you're in shape everybody gives a fuck so it's like when it's do you want to be at that level or not so if you want to be at that level where you go in and you said the other day when you were maxing out your bench the whole gym stopped and was watching you do you want to be at that point okay well you may have to go through a transition period where you are self-conscious, you just, you just need to work on your mental space and say, look, I'm doing this for a very small period of time to rectify the dumb shit that either I did to myself or another coach did. And just understand it's a very small, very small. I think fastest I've seen people recover from this stuff where we could start before weeks, if they did everything we say, sometimes it might take four months, but that is such a small part of time in your life. if you want to do it right. So you can either do it fast or you can do it right. If you do it right, guess what? You can lose it forever instead of just losing it fast. And that's one of the things that I see people do wrong is they don't plan. They don't periodize everything. They don't have an off season. They're just constantly dieting and they don't get stronger and they don't grow muscle and they get fat loss resistant and they get tired and then they get demotivated and they just don't do anything at all. And then they just get worse. So, um, you got to sit down with it, with a coach that knows what they're doing, um, preferably a muscle and

trained coach and they plan this whole thing out and say, look, your basal body temperature is like 35.4. That's not great. We need to increase your thermogenesis, which means we need food available. So we're going to have to eat more food and we're going to have to train a little bit and we have to grow some things and you're going to have to prioritize sleep and you're going to have to might have to give up some social things. You can still be social, but you might have to be that person that goes in and goes, no, I have goals and I don't want to eat like that. I'm going to have a salad with chicken, or I'm going to have a steak and some, you know, some potato and no, I'm not going to throw bacon bits and sour cream on that shit. But you have to understand that if you want that physique, you do have to make some sacrifices because nothing worth having, everything worth having is worth working for. So if you're not willing to work for it, you just accept the fact that it's not going to happen for you until you get your head right to actually pull to trigger and do it. And my God, I'm so grateful for you guys. And like, you know, you can navigate this stuff too. Like in July, I spoke in for NSCA and we went out to a steakhouse and I was, it was one of those low calorie weeks. And I was like, I'm fucked. What am I going to have at the steakhouse? Like, and they had, you know, a seared tuna appetizer, which if you know, you're going to get like a tuna, you know, there's nothing on it. And I asked for that with salad, with no dressing. And the guy was like, did you compete today? And I was like, dude, if I competed today, like I'd be face first in a ribeye right now. You don't understand. And everyone around me is getting like steaks and fries and all that stuff. And the thing that you have to think to yourself is like, that will always be there. It will be there when you're done. It doesn't mean you have to implode face first into these things and binge, but if you do it the right way, you don't feel the need to binge too, but it'll always be there. And you may have to give up temporarily the need to enjoy a steak with your friends, but you can still enjoy the time with your friends and then have something that is going to align you with your goals. A hundred percent, a hundred percent. Look, and you know, it's tempting to want to do that all the time, but the problem is that people they feel like they treat every meal like they're entitled to eat whatever the fuck they want or they treat every meal like it's a goddamn celebration it's like you don't have to do that like first and foremost look like let's throw that anti-dieting culture bullshit in the trash can okay if you're if you just want to lose some weight cool that's fine you don't need to track or measure anything as long as you have good nutritional literacy you can use hand measurements you can eyeball it you can work on your hunger cues and that type of thing if you're wanting to build an epic physique, it takes precision and accuracy, it takes discipline, it takes willpower, it takes fucking wherewithal to do it. And so that means that, you know, you have to treat food as fuel, I'm eating for performance, I'm not eating for pleasure, and then saving those times are going to eat for pleasure saving for when that matters, like somebody's birthday or a Christmas meal, or, you know, every once a month, you go with your friends, you go with your partner once a week. Like you can plan for all of this stuff, but you still, if you're, if you've got goals and you want to get there, you have to have boundaries, you have to have rules and you have to be able to stay, play by the rules and stay on those boundaries. And if you don't want to do that, then play the long game and focus on a really long recomp with a very small deficit for protein high. And then you can be a bit more flexible, just realize it's going to take a little bit longer to get there. That's the thing. And hopefully people are becoming a little bit more patient with your continued education that you've been putting out with, you know, a lot of the muscle nerds coaches being able to duplicate in some way, the same type of results for clients. Cause now people ask often like, well, how do you get people to buy into that? And when you've gone through the proper training and if you've gone through it yourself, it's a lot easier to be able to explain to somebody, this is what you should expect. This is what's going to happen. Like you predict like my what what I'm going to weigh you predict what I'm going to lift like it's like crazy where I'm like I need to lift more so I can prove them wrong you know like it's like it's amazing how you can accurately predict what is going to happen to me physiologically and sometimes mentally as well because you've done this over and over and over it's not like you just hopped on Instagram one day and fits boat and all of a sudden you're like yeah I'm going to become a coach like this is what real coaching is. It's not a program that you just email me and then say, Hey, talk to you later, like have a nice day. People are committing to this process and it is a big commitment. And I think that it's so important that you continue to get that message out because there so much on Instagram Like I had somebody asked me about waist trainers the other day and there a lot of misinformation that we think is like dead but it still there people still believe these things I still get asked if you know 30 grams of protein I was asked a couple of days ago at jiu-jitsu is 30 grams of protein the most you can digest I'm like no when's the last time you ate a rotisserie chicken a shit out of chicken leg it doesn't work like that now there's there's caps on how much is usable for things like building muscle but that's not the only thing you're using protein to build you're using it for calories protein oxidation you're using it to build enzymes there's a lot of things a lot of structures are building in the body not just your muscle um and now they used to think 40 grams was the limit for stimulating muscle party synthesis and they just another new literature came out said it's probably 70 so all these people saying you can only eat 30 grams i usually eat 70 to 100 grams of protein per mil just because I don't want to fucking eat 800 mils a day I'm good eating two or three mils that works with my schedule and it and so that's what I do but um it's it's so weird to me because when you look at athletic development let's say a guy is benching you know what's the first milestone for a guy that starts to lift 135 pounds 35 yeah what's the next one 185 then 225 then 275 then 315 and then if you if you want to get really strong then you 365 405 you're you're you can't rush that process you're not going to bench 135 and two weeks later you're benching 315 i don't even you take all the drugs in the world that you want you can eat all the food you want you sleep all you want you train all you want ain't gonna happen people look at developing strength as a slow continual gradual process of progressive of overload and eliminating weak areas. Why don't you use that same concept with building muscle and burning fat? Because it's the same thing. It's biology can only run so fast. It can only run so fast naturally, and it can only run so fast if you add supplements and drugs. But a lot of these things, if you understand the biology, these things are easy to predict. And that's why I can predict that because I know when I give a protocol, I've sat down for hours and I've thought it out. And I know exactly what's going to happen. And that's why I have a program design course, because we teach people how to do that. But that does, you have to learn a theory and then you have to get experience of actually doing it. And then you get to the point where you can say, okay, in six months, you should be at this body weight, give or take a couple of kilos. You should be at this body fat percentage. Your lift should be here and boom, you nail it. But that comes with over two decades of training people and an obsessive, compulsive, relentless pursuit for education. Both myself and my wife, we're a bit education junkies. We're knowledge junkies. So my wife is doing a degree right now. She's probably not going to do anything with it. And then she's already looking at her next degree. And it's just a bit of a weird obsession. I should probably go see a psychologist just about it. But it's something that I think more, more coaches need because even like Charlie still takes courses all the time and he takes courses over. And I don't think enough people do that. Cause they're like, yeah, I took that cert like 12 years ago. And I'm like, okay, but things have changed. I'm sure they've added, you guys add stuff all the time to your program design course. And I'm like, I've taken it like five times now and I'm going to take it again. Yeah, it really is. Like the value that you provide for the program design course, it is, I can't even explain. Like for the coaches listening, and I know you guys just started a new intake, you have to start that right now. Cause I literally cannot say that anything has changed my career the way this course has and the mentorship work that we've done. I make more money. I have much more confidence in what I'm doing. It's not just guessing at reducing calories or having knee-jerk reactions to when people complain. It's actually knowing the physiological process of why you're doing what you're doing and explaining it to the client and talking them off the ledge in a way that makes them understand that they're heard and that they're not crazy, even though we're very crazy. But I literally, I can't say enough about the value. And I swear that Luke's not paying me to say this. This is just me going off on a tangent. You guys have to take that. if you want to get good at coaching clients to get them the aesthetic results and in turn, they will have the emotional change and epiphanies. You have to take this course because nobody else is offering anything like this. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I've taken everything you can offer. I think unless there's something you've offered, I haven't taken it. You got no, not, not till I, not till I get time to do the other stuff, But, you know, and look, have I have I ever done anything crazy in your workouts? Have I ever done Have we ever talked about doing you know biasing a certain muscle or doing this Have we ever done weird ass rollerblading Yeah, no, the rollerblading is legit, I'm telling you. But most of the stuff we do teach is fundamental things, but it's the way we teach it and how we teach people to apply it. And we teach why it works and how it works. So you can, if you, if you understand the underlying physiology, anatomy, the biology, the biochemistry, just the basic, basic, at the basic level, like first, second semester of this stuff. If you understand that really deeply, you'll understand how to apply foundational fundamental things in a very complex way. So it's the way you put everything together. And I've never had to do any crazy ass shit. And you see in the program, we don't teach any crazy shit, but we teach it in a different way and teach people how to think about it differently. And for the most part, how to think, because people teach methods, but they don't explain how to modify the method, alter the method, sequence the method in the way that's designed for each person as their own end of one, their own experiment, their own journey. um people are too busy they're too busy complicating and convoluting biology and physiology and you don't really have to do that the coach should know how to apply this stuff in underlying science at a very complex level but they need to be able to distill that down into very simple action points for their clients and stuff their clients can actually do yeah i gotta say like throughout the entire when when stuff got hard like when when the dieting got hard like yeah it was hard yeah i was hungry but like it was not misery compared to stuff that other coaches made me do in my past and being a coach myself like all right yo this is like much more doable this is much more sane it's much more smart like i enjoyed that whole process and people say like enjoy the process you know whether you're on a journey to lose a little bit or you want to get you know dick skin like i wanted to like you expect a certain level of difficulty but it never got to the point where it's like i hate this i can't do this i don't want to do that you know like it's smart and it's not beating people over the head and making them diet for months on end which i think a lot of people do when they don't know what else to do that's like the knee jerk reaction let's just lower calories let's keep lowering it's not working i think i think at that point too it's it's one of those things where I'm really tempted to put this on the whiteboard to really really get people to understand this