Body Fat Categories and Physiological Adaptations

So at that point, I'll go to a smaller deficit and keep rolling, right? So like right now, 50%, 60% deficit. when it and i use it kind of like a jump start yeah and just try to drop like four or five pounds of fat really quick to i'll increase training volume a little bit but i'll also increase food and then i'll cruise on like maybe a five or six hundred calorie deficit which now it'll be if you can get through two weeks of pretty sparing modified fast uh six even a 700 calorie there is nothing nothing you're not even hungry you're like man i could do this all the time but it's it kind of goes back to something i learned from la mcdonald who very contentious personality as everybody knows but the guy's brilliant like he knows his shit he's no bullshit he knows his stuff he he talks about like these categories of dieters and a lot of this produce bearing modified fast stuff i learned from him and marty kendall and a bunch of other guys charles pollocklin who was a big mentor of mine so but i like la has has done a really good job of really systemizing some of this stuff. So your category is going to be based on your body fat level. So because I'm under 15%, you don't want to do a protein, sperm modified fast for a really long time. Like you use it for really short bursts. So typically 11 or 12 days, and then take a couple of days to refeed carbs and then like roll into something that's, that's not as intense with a, with a nutrition, not as intense with a deficit. Gotcha. Yeah. So because that's what I I was kind of wondering, again, were you just kind of using it as a way to jumpstart? And then at some point you were going to increase, and that's obviously what you're doing there. You're going to go back to a more normal deficit here, but just kind of getting a good jumpstart on everything to get started. Because the nice thing about this, I mean, again, this is not something for everybody. This is probably one of the hardest things you could possibly do with your training and nutrition. but if you can get through it and you lose a tremendous amount of body fat really quickly, then you can, you can kind of, you can slow it down. You can take your time, right? So, cause normally what I do is I, I start and January 2nd and I'll go until the 25th of February, which is my birthday. So I give myself a good, like seven and a half, eight weeks, something like that. Right. And this time I wanted to see if I could take it a little bit further. I usually get down to like eight or nine percent. And this time I'm like, well, I'm getting old. Do I still have it within me to get even leaner than that? Like, OK, the only way I'm going to be able to do that is I need to start a little bit earlier. And if I can get a good bit of it off right at the jump start, then I can I can have some fun during Christmas and New Year's. And I can slow it down a little bit because I'll be starting on January 2nd at a significantly leaner position than I usually do. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Start it off quick now. And then you have, you know, obviously Christmas, stuff like that. And then you can slow it down. But you also give yourself more time. So you're looking to get pretty shredded during this. Yeah, I'm going to try to get more shredded than I have in a long time. But like this really extreme difficult, like at this lean level of body fat, very difficult. You have to be like, you have to have a coming to Jesus talk with yourself because you're going to be in some pretty dark places during that. So if you're, if you're under 15%, like a real 15%, not what the bros on line think is 15%, but a real 15%, it's pretty brutal. And it's, it's unnecessary really. If you, because all I'm doing is I'm just speeding up the process by what, four to six weeks. That's all I'm doing. Right. But if you are really overweight it a great diet If you can if you can stay on it even with a lot of the new GPs that have come out like the ozempics and the things like that If you look at some of the literature where they talk about like and you see this in the news where we talk about, oh, ozempic causes like muscle loss. It can, yeah, because it basically makes you not eat. But all the recommendations on how to, on how to overcome that are basically protein sparing, modified fast and low volume weightlifting. Now that's not what they're saying. That's what I'm saying. But I was looking through a bunch of the data the other day because one of my clients wants to take some GLP-1. And they basically say you need to up your protein quite a bit and you need to make sure you're lifting weights, but don't lift weights too much. So that sounds just like a protein sparing modified fast. So you just eat all protein and you train like three days a week with just enough volume to not waste your muscle. You throw a GLP-1, which I'm not doing. I would if I could get my hands on it. I'd try it. Why not? Because I haven't tried that class yet. But it's like it sounds like that would be the perfect trifecta combination for people that wanted to lose a tremendous amount of body fat. If you were 40% body fat and you wanted to rip it off really quick, you could feasibly do that long term if you're that overweight. And then when you get to an average body weight level, you can start to slow it down a little bit. and people would not have a problem losing weight if that was the case. Yeah. I think a lot of people don't understand like, you know, they, and this comes back to what we initially talked about, how like, you know, people say like, oh, you shouldn't lose this quick or again, and they kind of lose, they just don't understand that like where you're at, like the nuance of it is super important. So kind of what you're saying there is like, obviously at higher body fat levels, you know, we can, we can push the weight loss. Like you don't really need to necessarily worry about that, that too much. And people get too caught up and like, oh, you know, metabolic adaptation and stuff like that. When it's like, when you're that high of body fat, it really isn't that important. But as you get leaner, that's something that you, again, you may want to start to pay attention to a little bit more. You probably can't do these extreme weight loss protocols for extended periods of time. Cause then you will potentially, you know, lose muscle and feel like crap in the process. Yeah. Well, you know what I said earlier about walking stuff back. I have had to walk stuff back. I just don't do it publicly because I think it's obnoxious. But if you, if you're in cerebral subscription, or if you come to my courses, you come to live courses, you'll hear me say all the time, look, this is what I used to think this is what I was taught and we were wrong. And then I apologize. Now, let me tell you where this is applicable. But also, let me tell you the opposite side of that as well. So you have a clear picture. But, you know, I used to say, oh, I used to be the same guy. Like you can't you can't put guys under fifteen hundred and women under twelve hundred. You got to feed blah, blah, blah. And it's it's it's not it's not correct. It isn't like it just depends. If you eat really low like that. Yeah. You have to modify a lot of other things you're doing. And yeah, you're going to have an issue with performance and sleep and mood that there are, it's not without negative side effects, which is why a lot of people can't handle it because it's, it's just, it sucks. It's, but you have to look at it like this is a, this is a small piece of time. If I'm looking at a year and this is say four weeks of that year, that's not a lot of time. If I can just push through this, I'm good. And then you can decide to go on something that's a little bit more moderate. But, you know, a few years ago, like around right before COVID and during COVID, a little bit after everybody was talking about reds, relative energy deficiency in sport. And they got in this really big kick that you need to keep feeding people more that everybody's going to get reds if you put them on low calories. And I'm like, wait a minute. No, no, no. This is relative energy deficiency for sport. These are people who are training like 21 hours a week and eating 1200 calories. Your client who's massively overweight kind of goes through the motions three days a week at the gym. It doesn't really, they exercise, they don't actually train that fat people don't get reds. Sorry. They have, they have ample amounts of stored energy on their body. And if you look at the Minnesota starvation study, and if you look at, there was another study where they had a guy that was three, I think it's 375 pounds and he went 360 something days with zero food. He basically had a multivitamin mineral in water and it was in a nutrition award. It was underseen by doctors and he lost all the weight and he kept it off. Like technically speaking, if you have that much food that's already on your body that you haven't, it's like food from the past, right? Food that if you have body fat, that is food from the past that for whatever reason you couldn't deal with at the time, you're not going to starve to death as long as you have all the cofactors you need to run your biochemistry and you stay hydrated, you're fine. Now, you shouldn't do that unless you're under doctor supervision. However, this notion that you can't feed people low-calorie diets, they're going to lose muscle. So what? It's not healthy. Neither is being obese. So you pick your poison. You're either obese and dying or you shred it down and you do an unhealthy long unsustainable diet for a while to get your body weight and your fat level to a healthy position And then you learn how to eat normally again. Well, and I'm sure even in that process, because of the fact that, you know, we have plenty of energy on our bodies, as long as, you know, we're doing some of these things we're talking about, Hey, you're lifting at least a little bit, right. You're, you're eating protein. I mean, you really, you know, maybe you lose a little bit of muscle, but I mean, you really realistically shouldn't lose that much anyways, at that point, right. With based on wherever right. Well, well, you will, you will, if you're really obese, you will. And, but, but there's a, there's a very good reason for this. And there's also a reason why it's not a big deal. People who are significantly overweight already have an unnatural, a naturally higher level of lean body mass anyways, from carrying all the weight around. Okay. So when, if you lose that, if you look at the statistics, a lot of people who are really like morbidly obese have 25% increased lean body mass or increased muscle tissue, whatever you want to call it, because something has to support all that muscle. Now, when they get to the point where they can't produce enough muscle to overcome that, now you get people who are bedridden or they have to sit in those little scooters and things like that. And we're talking people who are like six, 700 pounds. But if you get a guy who's 400 pounds, there's a good chance that he has basically the lean body mass of a guy on steroids, but not from the steroids, just from carrying around like 50% more weight than his body needs to be carrying. So even if you lose some of that, it's not that big of a deal because it shouldn't be there anyways, because it's only there because something has to fight gravity when you stand up. Yeah, that, that makes a lot of sense actually. Yeah. So, I mean, that's something that I've probably been wrong on in the past too, where I'm like, well, you know, these people probably don't have as much muscle as they think, but from what it sounds like, you know, maybe they do have a little bit more because of the fact that you just, I mean, you're carrying all that weight around and that's resistance. Let me get my, I always have my calculator. It's my favorite thing. Let's say you get a guy who's 450 pounds, right? Now let's say that 70% body fat. Yeah, that's 350. That's 315 pounds, right? So that means 30% that for, what did I say? 315 divided by 0.7 times 0.3. I mean, he's got a, he's got a pretty decent amount of muscle on him. Like he, even if you lose some of that, it's not like he's going to have sarcopenia and brittle bones. And you know, his bones are probably, if you put them in a DEXA scan, probably bones are better than every, anybody else you see, because again, something has to hold that weight up as it fights gravity. So, I mean, I think this is kind of a good segue into this. So like, I mean, this is something too, that I've learned from you is like kind of the adaptations at both, both ends of the body fat spectrum, right? Again, people kind of think it's like, again, same principles still apply from, you know, losing body fat, but you know, and we may have hit on this a little bit, but what are some of the differences as you kind of like lose body fat in terms of how you would potentially go about like, like dropping that body fat? Like looking through the different categories, right? Yep. Yeah. So, and again, I always love to give credit where I learn stuff. I got this from Lon McDonald. I don't know if this is his proprietary thing. I don't know if he got this out of research or who he got it from. I don't know, but I'd still, that's who I learned from. So I'm going to also say, give him the credit, even though he called me a donkey ass once and called me a steroid freak monkey and then banned me on Facebook. But I don't care. I don't care. You can call me whatever you want. If you have good information, we're still good. I don't give a shit. Like I'm a Xenual. Like I'm from back. Nothing offends me. You can say anything you want about me. I don't give a, don't talk about my dogs and my wife or my car. I'll fuck you up. But talk about me. I don't give a shit. So, but