Metabolic Adaptation and Mitochondrial Health

It's a terrible recipe. It's a terrible one. But it's what we're taught to do, right? It's like, okay, well, if you're not losing weight, you're either still overeating your calories or you're still not training enough. And, yeah, calories in versus calories out, that sounds very simple. until you understand that there's a lot more calories in than just simple mathematics, and there's a lot more calories out than simple mathematics. There's a lot of things that alter calories in and calories out. So you can leverage things like mitochondrial health. If your mitochondria is not working well, you're not oxidizing fuel very well. If your VO2 max is really low because you're out of shape, you need oxygen to oxidize things. You need good, healthy volume of mitochondria. You need cofactors, a good multivitamin. You need lots of B vitamins. You need magnesium. You need zinc. You need copper. There's all these things you need realistically if you want to be able to lose weight the right way and keep it off forever. So while sometimes eating a little bit less and exercising a little bit more, sometimes that is the answer. But for most people, I find it's not the right answer initially. It's not the right solution initially. And what I find is a lot of people already have disordered eating patterns and a disordered idea of what exercise is. So they use exercise to burn calories instead of using exercise to drive long-term adaptation. You look in the literature and you see all of these studies on the fact that people will tend to overestimate how many calories they burn in a workout. They tend to underestimate how much they eat I get that I totally get that especially especially with obese people There are people who are you know class one class two class three obese to the end and very very overweight But I train primarily other coaches. And those coaches, a lot of them understand how to track and we teach them how to track the right way. And so a lot of them, it's like, shit, man, if they're tracking and they're being honest with me, sometimes they aren't underreporting. We get people in here all the time that are eating, luckily, they eat 1,000 calories a day. They eat almost no protein, and they want to come in, and they want to train like crazy, and they don't understand why they're not losing any more weight. They're like, well, I hardly eat. You're right. You are hardly eating, but your body has adaptive mechanisms to save yourself when you go into starvation. This isn't any type of metabolic damage or starvation, what do they call it, starvation mode. It's just basically a maladaptation of certain biochemical pathways and your endocrinology.