The Nuance of Calorie Deficits

Yeah, okay. So look, at the end of the day, it losing weight or putting weight on is a simple algebraic expression. It's a minus B or a plus C or a minus B or a plus B equals C. That's it like that. If you eat more than you expend, you will put on weight. If you eat less than you expend, you will lose weight. But now the nuance comes into what is that weight made of? Because if you were to go into a surplus, and you didn't lift weights, most of what you would put on would be body fat, which is probably not what somebody's goal is. And if you were to go into a deficit and not lift weights, you would lose a lot of muscle tissue, which is again, what we're trying to keep people from doing. Like if, if, if I had someone hire me to coach them and they said, I want to lose weight and I go, okay, this is how we do it. We strength train at least three days, four, if you can two, if that's, That's the absolute minimum. That's all you can do two days a week. And you have to lift weights and we go into a deficit. If they go, no, no, no, I would rather not lift weights and just starve myself. I'm like, no, it doesn't work like that. Anybody can lose weight. Do a lot of cardio, like train for a marathon. Don't eat any protein and starve yourself. You will lose tons of weight, but you'll be so unhappy with the way you look and you will completely wreck your health. So there are things that we have to add to that SECO equation that dictates what you're gaining, what you're losing, whether you're doing it in a healthy manner versus unhealthy manner. And then if we get into the real big nuance of, say, programming, how much weight training do you do? Well, that depends on how your diet is set up. How much deficit do you do? Well, that depends on how your weight training is set up. I think you probably remember me saying you have three main levers you can pull. You can lean on diet, you can lean on training, or you can lean on a little bit of both. So that basically means is that if I'm going to go into a deficit to lose body fat and I want to lean on my nutrition, okay, we have to write the nutrition first. Then we have to write the training program and the training program has to match up with the nutrition. Okay if I gonna lean on training I have to write the training first and then I have to write the nutrition in line with the training Now if I going to utilize a little bit of both I have leverage to just equalize both of those at the same time, right? So for example, I'm a big fan, you heard me talk about protein sparing, modified fast, you heard me talk about big deficits. And that's one thing that a lot of people have gotten away from with the anti diet crowd. And they are, you shouldn't diet dieting doesn't work diets the only thing that works like a deficit is the only thing that works whether you get that through training or whether you get that through your diet you have to it's again we're right back at seco you have to respect that energy balance equation and it really shouldn't be calories in versus calories out what it should be is energy in and energy out because calories aren't a tangible thing it's a unit of measurement right And since this is mainly going to be like a lot of your clients are going to listen to this, this is something they need to understand. Calories don't exist. It's a theoretical construct of a measurement of energy. So it'd be like this. So originally, I'm American originally, but I live in Australia now. And so I'm fully on the metric system. I wish America would get on the metric system and make things so much easier. But if I go this, if I said this was an inch, you would say, no, it's not. It's 2.54 centimeters. We're both talking about the same measure of distance. We're just using two different measuring systems. So if we go, I'm going to measure energy in and energy out. You could say calories if you're a normal person or you talk to a scientist and they go, no, no, it's kilojoules. They're both the same thing. You could measure either one. So people need to understand it's realistically energy out, energy in, and that's all that matters.