Ep. #478: How to Use Energy Balance to Lose Fat & Gain Muscle

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including bigger, leaner, stronger for men. Thinner, leaner, stronger for women, my flexible dieting cookbook, the shredded chef, and my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym.

The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best bodies ever. And you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes Noble stores.

Again, that’s bigger leaner stronger for men, thinner leaner stronger for women, The shredded chef and the little black book of workout motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audio books, 100 percent free when you sign up for an audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting.

Meal prepping and cleaning more interesting, entertaining, and productive. So if you want to take audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www. legionathletics. com slash audible. That’s L E G I O N athletics slash a U D I B L E. And sign up for your account.

Hello, friendly. Welcome to most for life. I’m Mike Matthews, your gracious host. And this time around, we’re going to be talking about energy balance. Now, this is something that I have touched on in a number of different episodes, but I haven’t recorded The definitive long form monologue on energy balance.

And as it is very important to understand, I figured it would be worth the time to dive deep into the topic and give you really everything you need to know about energy balance to maximize fat loss. And muscle gain, not necessarily at the same time, but we’ll talk more about that soon. And let me ask you a few questions.

Have you ever stopped losing weight despite quote unquote, doing everything right with your diet? Have you ever struggled to gain weight no matter what you ate? Have you ever wondered why some people can stay lean eating sugar and junk food? Regularly? The principles of energy balance answer those questions and many more because energy balance really is the fundamental law that dictates how your body weight changes over time and it can be used to intentionally gain or lose weight as desired.

And what that means is With what you are going to learn in this podcast, you will be able to consistently break through weight loss plateaus. You’ll be able to kickstart weight gain in even if you think you’re a hard gainer, and you’ll be able to maintain the body composition that you want, particularly the body fat percentage that you want with ease.

The bottom line is out of everything that you could learn about dieting. Energy balance should be at the top of your list because it really is the biggest linchpin. In other words, if you don’t understand energy balance and you don’t know how to use it to your advantage, you will never be able to put the rest of the diet puzzle together.

You will always struggle with your weight. You will always be susceptible to the latest fad diet craze, and you will never quite understand. Why some approaches to dieting seem to work and others don’t. Let’s start at the top with what is energy balance, of course. Energy balance is the relationship between the amount of energy that you feed your body and the amount of energy that it burns.

This is expressed in calories. And one calorie is the amount of energy that it takes to heat one kilogram of water, one degrees Celsius. That’s the dictionary definition of calorie. When we’re talking about food in the context of food, that’s what it means. There are other definitions that are different, but those apply to different contexts.

Now, as you probably know, various foods contain. varying amounts of calories, and that is varying amounts of energy. For example, nuts are very energy dense. There’s a lot of calories in nuts. They contain about six and a half calories per gram. Now, something like celery, on the other hand, contains very little stored energy.

It has just about 0. 15 calories per gram. No, it does not contain negative calories, by the way. You cannot lose weight by eating a bunch of celery. If only it were that easy. So what that means then is if you add up the calories of all the foods that you eat every day, you get this. You have a number there.

You have your total calorie intake for the day, and then if you compare that to how much energy that you are burning in the day to day through basic physiological processes and all physical activity, you’re going to notice one of three things. You’re going to notice that you are consistently consuming more energy than you’re burning.

And if this is the case, then your body is in a state of positive energy balance. And the result of that is weight gain over time. And you’re going to learn more about why that is soon. Now, if that’s not the case, you might notice that you are consistently burning more energy than you’re consuming. And this is known as a state of negative energy balance, your body being a state of negative energy balance.

And the result of that is weight loss over time. And if that’s not the case, then you are going to be burning more or less the same amount of energy that you’re consuming. Of course, it’s never going to be exact, but you’re going to find that your intake is generally around your output. And when this is the case, your body is in a state of neutral energy balance.

And the result of that is just weight. Maintenance, your weight is going to fluctuate in the day to day slightly, but over time, you’re more or less just going to weigh the same. Now, despite what the latest and greatest fake doctor, fake weight loss expert guru guy or gal might tell you, none of that is a hypothesis or debunked theory.

That is, Settled science. Truly. That is the first law of thermodynamics at work. And that’s why every single controlled weight loss study conducted in the last century or so, including countless meta analyses and systematic reviews, has concluded that meaningful weight loss requires energy expenditure to exceed energy intake over time.

Full stop. End of story. And anecdotally speaking, that’s also why bodybuilders dating back just as far, going back to the beginning, Sandow, his times, all the way through Reeves and on the way up the line, all those guys have been using this knowledge to systematically and routinely reduce and increase their body fat levels.

They are experts at it and this is why. And so remember that when the next brand of calorie denying comes around because they come And they go. One for one, they fail to gain acceptance in the weight loss literature, because the weight of the evidence is so overwhelming at this point that scientists are not concerning themselves with proving it further, but With trying to learn how to get people to understand it and apply it, and particularly through good behaviors and good habits, because many people don’t want to have to think about how many calories they’re eating or burning.

They just want to follow simple guidelines that will help them lose weight or maintain weight or even gain weight, stuff like eat three to five servings of protein per day. Eat three to five servings of vegetables per day. Make sure you get in some fruit. Limit your intake of highly processed, refined, relatively non nutritious foods and so forth.

But none of that changes the reality, which is that a century of metabolic research has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that energy balance is the basic mechanism that regulates body weight, that regulates weight gain and weight loss. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to count your calories to lose weight or to maintain weight or gain weight, but it does mean that you need to truly understand how your calorie intake and how your calorie expenditure influences your body weight.

And then you need to know how to eat accordingly. Now, before we get into the how to use energy balance to lose weight or gain weight or maintain weight with ease, let’s dispel four of the most common misconceptions about energy balance. Let’s do some debunking. Because you have probably heard people argue against what I’m talking about against the primacy of energy balance and calorie intake.

Some people say that everything I’ve discussed so far is contradicted or even debunked by the latest scientific research on the human metabolism. Others offer up stories about their own weight gain or weight loss or the experiences of others that seem to defy the principles of energy in versus energy out.

And some people are saying that calories in and calories out is a relic of our ignorant past. And now we understand that there are far more factors involved in weight loss and weight gain and weight maintenance. And if you simply pay attention to your calories, you’re almost certainly going to fail.

Let’s talk about these things. Let’s start with the. Claim that people make along the lines of I lost weight on this diet and I never counted calories. It’s easy to find people who have lost a lot of weight without ever paying attention to how many calories they were eating. Maybe they went low carb, maybe they stopped eating meat or sugar or maybe animal products altogether.

Or just started eating quote unquote cleaner and they sure did lose weight. What they didn’t realize though is the root cause of their weight loss was not the food choices per se, but the relationship between how much energy they were eating. and how much energy they were burning energy balance. In other words, these people lost weight because their new diet kept them in a state of negative energy balance long enough for meaningful weight loss to occur, not because the diet had the right foods or avoided the wrong ones.

Most weight loss diets out there revolve around food restriction. They tell you what you can’t eat. They make you limit your menu and avoid. certain foods and in some cases certain food groups like carbs or sugars of any kind for example. And what this inevitably does is it forces you to cut various higher calorie foods out of your diet which also happen to be the ones that are highly palatable, very tasty, and thus very easy to overeat.

And so when you cut these foods out your calorie intake naturally goes down and once it The expenditure threshold, you start to get leaner. If it doesn’t though, if energy expenditure never exceeds consumption, or if you want to look at it the other way, if energy consumption always exceeds expenditure, even if it only exceeds it by one calorie, no fat loss will occur.

Ever. Period. Another common claim that people make is I starved myself and I didn’t lose weight. And if you skim through the interwebs, especially fitness forums, you’re going to find a lot of this. You’re going to find a lot of people reporting no weight loss despite eating all the time. What they think is a very small number of calories every day.

This then is often held up as proof that everything that we’re discussing here is simply not true or at least it’s not true for everyone that some people simply can’t lose weight through calorie restriction alone. While the frustration these people feel is definitely understandable, it doesn’t mean their metabolisms work in fundamentally different ways than ours and everyone else’s.

What’s actually happening here is almost always nothing more than a then human error the three most common mistakes these people make are one underestimating actual calorie intake and unfortunately most of us are really bad at accurately estimating how many calories we eat every day a number of studies have shown this for example one study showed that while People might think they’re eating about 800 calories per day.

They could easily be eating 1200 or even 1500 or more. Yeah, they could be eating double the amount of calories that they think they’re eating. And of course they report they’re eating. Another common mistake that these people make is overeating too frequently. Most of us don’t realize how much our quote unquote cheat meals, or worse, our cheat days can set us back.

So a quick example here. Let’s say you stick to your diet faithfully throughout the week, and you eat about 300 calories less than you burn every day, and you end. Your Friday with a total weekly deficit so far of about 1500 calories. That’s great. You’ll have lost somewhere around a half a pound of body fat, probably a little bit less, but then the weekend comes and you’re now less active and you’re more lax about your diet.

Let’s say Saturday is your cheat day and you put down about 1000 more calories than you burn, which is very easy to do, by the way, if you just eat whatever you want. Let’s say you’re a, an average person, you burn about 2000 calories on a low physical activity day, like a Saturday. Let’s say if that is a low physical activity day for you, like it is for many people, just go poke around online.

on a calorie counting website and just see how easy it is to eat 3000 calories when you’re eating stuff that is delicious. It is very easy. And then let’s say that the next day, Sunday is a lighter version of the Saturday. And on that day you end a couple hundred calories over what you burned for the day.

What have you done? That’s right. You’ve basically erased your entire week’s calorie deficit in those two days, which puts you back to square one. All right, another common mistake is failing to account for water retention. Because when you keep your body in a calorie deficit, and especially a large calorie deficit, you lose fat, but you also tend to retain more water.

And this is especially true for women. And the reason for this is Calorie restriction increases the production of a stress hormone called cortisol, which in turn increases water retention. And depending on your physiology and how severely you are dieting, how large your calorie deficit is and how long you’ve been in a calorie deficit for and what you’re doing in the gym and how you’re sleeping and how your stress levels are.

Water retention can be minimal or it can be quite strong. It can be so significant that it actually just completely obscures even a couple weeks of fat loss. So in other words, you can lose a couple of pounds of fat over the course of a couple of weeks without losing weight. Because you’re retaining just as much water and this can of course give the appearance that calorie counting just doesn’t work.

All right, so let’s move on to the next claim that I want to debunk and that is if you eat clean then calories don’t matter. And this one is often used in the context of weight loss. I’m sure you’ve heard that you just have to eat clean if you want to lose weight. You got to cut out the sugar, you got to cut out the junk food, you got to cut out the processed carbs and then the fat will really start to melt off.

The reality though is clean calories count just as much as dirty ones. In other words, if all we’re talking about is body weight, then a calorie is very much a calorie. Now, if we want to improve our body composition, things change. We need to go a little bit beyond calories in and calories out, but we’re going to talk more about that soon.

So based on we have just discussed, you can probably guess why eating nothing but quote unquote clean foods has helped so many people lose weight because it has many people do quote unquote clean up their diets. and lose weight in the process. The reason for that is most dirty foods like pizza and cheeseburgers, candy, ice cream, and so on are also high in calories and very easy to overeat.

They’re delicious. Once you get rid of them though, your calorie intake can drop a lot and weight loss can really begin in earnest. And so what that means is you don’t have to eliminate those types of foods from your diet to lose weight, but it’s going to help. Practically speaking, it’s a good idea because it’s going to help you ensure that your calorie intake remains below your calorie expenditure.

And so long as that’s the case, you are going to lose weight regardless of what you eat. Even if you only ate junk food, if you keep your calories beneath your expenditure, you will lose weight. And if you are not quite convinced, then let me introduce you to a guy named Professor Mark Haub, and he lost 27 pounds in 10 weeks eating hostess cupcakes, Doritos, Oreos, and whey protein shakes.

Yes, that was his diet for 10 weeks. And if you want to read more about that, just Google Mark Haub, H A U B, weight loss, and it’ll come up. Another good example you can read about is a guy named John Cisna, C I S N A, who lost 56 pounds in six months eating nothing but McDonald’s. And Jordan Syatt, S Y A T, who’s a popular fitness influencer and educator, did a similar ish experiment of his own just to prove that energy balance is true.

Is all that really matters if we’re talking about weight loss. He lost, I want to say, six pounds in four or five weeks eating a Big Mac every day. And he documented it for his YouTube channel and he probably put it up on the other social media channels as well. But you can watch the little documentary slash experiment over on YouTube if you just search for Jordan Syatt.

Now that isn’t to say that I recommend you do the same, that I recommend you just eat a gas station diet and drink protein shakes because you can or eat a bunch of McDonald’s because you can because the nutritional value of your diet certainly matters. But I’m just sharing those case studies, so to speak, to prove the point that when it comes to weight loss or weight gain, energy balance is king.

Another claim that people make that is wrong is that the human body is not an inorganic machine, you can’t apply the same rules. And this is usually in reference to the first law of thermodynamics, when people say that doesn’t apply to the human metabolism, because there are many other factors. Our body is far more complicated than a simple heat engine.

The type of thing that powers our refrigerator or our car. And sometimes these arguments can be convincing because they can be chockfull of all kinds of fancy talk, like entropy and chaos theory, metabolic advantage. And tangents on some of the more esoteric aspects of our endocrine system. And by the way, if you’re not familiar with the first law of thermodynamics, it’s just the law of conservation of energy, right?

So it states that the total energy of a system is constant. It can be transformed from one form to another, but can’t be created or destroyed. So in the context of energy balance, what that means is we have energy that is stored as body fat and by consistently burning more energy than we’re eating. We are forcing our body to burn some of that body fat and transform some of that energy into gases that we exhale.

That’s the final by product of the whole system. And those gases go off and ultimately turn into other forms of energy in other different ways. All right. So back to the point here of the human body is not. So simple. You can’t apply simple rules. Yeah, this stuff is just smoke and mirrors. It is true that the human body is far more complex than a combustion engine.

But as I’ve mentioned, there is a very good reason why literally every single controlled weight loss study conducted in the last century or so has concluded that meaningful weight loss requires calories in to be lower than calories out. out. Research shows that it works the same in lean people as obese people and in healthy people and diseased people including people with metabolic disorders.

Energy balance is a first principle of the human metabolism and it simply cannot be circumvented or ignored. Hey, before we continue, if you like what I’m doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my best selling health and fitness books.

My most popular ones are Bigger, Leaner, Stronger for Men, Thinner, Leaner, Stronger for Women, my flexible dieting cookbook, The Shredded Chef. And, my 100 percent practical, hands on blueprint for personal transformation, The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Now, these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped thousands of people build their best body ever, and you can find them anywhere online, where you can buy books like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in selected stores.

Barnes Noble stores. So again, that is Bigger Leaner Stronger for Men, Thinner Leaner Stronger for Women, The Shredded Chef, and The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation. Oh, and one other thing is, you can get any one of those audiobooks 100 percent free when you sign up for an Audible account, and that’s a great way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting, meal prepping, and cleaning, a More interesting, entertaining, and productive.

Now if you want to take Audible up on that offer and get one of my audiobooks for free, just go to legionathletics. com slash Audible and sign up for your account. All right, moving on, let’s get to the practical stuff. Let’s talk about how to use energy balance to lose weight effectively, which is why many people want to learn about it in the first place.

So you now know that you can lose weight by consistently feeding your body fewer calories It burns over time, and while that is all well and good, we need to go a bit deeper than that, because your goal should not be to merely lose weight, but to lose fat and not muscle. In other words, the aim should be improving your body composition, not Losing some arbitrary amount of weight or reaching some arbitrary weight.

Now to do that, to lose fat and not muscle effectively, you need good answers to three questions. One, how large should your calorie deficit be? Two, how should you break those calories down into macros? And three, how do you turn them around? those macros into an effective meal plan. So let’s talk about each of these things.

Let’s start with how large your calorie deficit should be. So many people approach this in an extreme way. They just starve themselves. And yes, you will lose weight if you starve yourself because you’re going to be eating a lot less energy than you’re burning. But this approach has consequences. It makes you much more likely to lose muscle.

It slows your metabolism down. It makes hunger and cravings and mood swings a lot worse than they need to be. And it often leads to The post diet rebound, where after the period of starvation, when the person tries to go back to normal eating, the pendulum just swings too far in the other direction and they end up gaining all the weight that they lost or in some cases even gaining more weight than they lost.

So after all of that, they just wind up fatter. And this is why I recommend that you use an aggressive but not reckless diet. Calorie deficit of about 20 to 25%. And what that means is I recommend that you eat about 20 to 25 percent fewer calories than you burn every day. And research shows that this is a sweet spot of sorts where you can lose fat rapidly while also preserving your muscle and your sanity.

And anecdotally, it has been shown to work with at this point. I’ve personally worked with thousands and thousands, if not. Tens of thousands at this point in my email inbox is at 150, 000 plus emails sent and received, but worked with minimally thousands and thousands of people, all ages and all circumstances, and have seen this work consistently and effectively.

And then if you just look at the body composition space in general, so to speak, you’ll also find that most effective diet programs Utilize a calorie deficit around 20%. Sometimes they are even less aggressive. Sometimes they’ll go as low as 15% or even 10%, but I think that’s more relevant to bodybuilders who are going to be dieting over long periods of time and are trying to lose as little muscle as possible, and I think it’s less.

applicable to just an everyday average person who has 20 or 30 pounds to lose and they don’t want to be stupid about it but they also don’t want to make it take twice as long as it could simply to retain some minuscule amount of muscle or in many cases to experience no negative muscle related effects because oftentimes these people are also starting resistance training for the first time in their lives or at least The first time in a while, and that means that they’re going to be able to gain muscle while losing fat.

And when that’s the case, then you might as well maximize fat loss and still gain some muscle along the way. And to do that, a calorie deficit of 20 to max 25 percent will get it done. Now, you are probably wondering how to figure out what that number is for you. How many. Calories. Should you be eating?

We could go into the details here, or you could just head over to legionathletics. com and search for calories. And you’ll find an article that I wrote to find a number of articles that have this calculator, but one of them in particular is how many calories do you really burn every day? You also will find an article along the lines of how many calories should you eat every day?

Both of those articles, including a few others, have a calculator built in that will make it very easy for you to estimate how much energy you’re burning every day, and then what 75 to 80 percent of that number. will be and once you have that number great that’s your daily target intake for calories to lose weight effectively now how should those calories break down into macros what are macros macros you’ve probably heard this term it’s just short for macronutrient which is a nutrient that your body needs in a large amount to survive and the primary macronutrients that we’re concerned with are protein carbs and fat and this is important how your calories break down into protein carbs and fat is important because While calories in and calories out dictates weight loss, it dictates how your weight changes.

We don’t just want weight to change. We want body composition to change. We want to lose fat and we want to not lose muscle. And on the flip side, if you’re somebody who wants to gain weight, you want to gain at least as much muscle as you can with as little fat as you can. And when We are looking at this through the lens of body composition.

We have to drill down and we have to specify where our calories are coming from in terms of macronutrients. This is, as far as body composition is concerned, more important than the foods that we are eating to get those macros. The most important part of this is that we hit our macro targets. It is far less important the foods that we eat to get there.

Now, yes, food choices do matter. Nutrition does matter. But as far as body composition goes, at least in the short term, it doesn’t really matter. And so what I recommend then is you get the majority of your calories from relatively unprocessed, nutritious foods that you have to prepare yourself. But if you want to use, let’s say up to 20 percent of your calories every day for stuff that isn’t particularly healthy or nutritious, but you just like, like it could be some ice cream.

It could be some. I like dark chocolate. I have some dark chocolate every day. It can be whatever. And the only food I would say that you should really avoid is artificial trans fats that you’ll find in like cereals and microwavable dessert foods and stuff that you probably won’t be eating much of anyway, if you are dieting to lose weight, because you’ll quickly find out how many calories those foods have and how Small your servings would have to be and you’d rather just use those calories on something maybe less delicious if you find that stuff delicious, but more satisfying because you get to eat a bit more of it.

All right, so let’s talk about macros. What’s your macros look like when you are cutting? Pretty simple. Eat around one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Studies show that this amount is plenty for. maintaining muscle while you lose fat and can also boost fat loss as well. Now, if you’re very overweight, so if you’re a guy, let’s say 25 percent body fat and up, or a woman about 30 percent body fat and up, then I would say about 30 to 40 percent of your daily calories should come from protein.

That’s an easier way to look at it. And how you determine that? One gram of protein contains about four calories. So let’s say let’s just keep it simple and say that your target calorie intake is 2000 calories and you’re going to get 40 percent of those calories from protein. That’s 800 calories from protein divided by four, 200 grams of protein per day.

Next up, let’s talk about fat intake. I recommend somewhere around 0. 25 grams of fat per pound of body weight. per day. This comes out to about 15 to maybe 20 max, 25 percent of daily calories for most people. And the reason why I recommend this is research shows that it is adequate for maintaining healthy hormone levels and general health.

Fat’s important for absorbing nutrients from the foods that you eat. For example, you do not need to follow a low carb diet to lose weight. In fact, I don’t recommend you start there unless you are very overweight and rather sedentary. But if you are a little bit overweight. And especially if it’s more a matter of aesthetics or vanity, if you just want to lose 15 pounds, not because you are even considered overweight, but you just want to lose 15 pounds because you want abs or whatever.

And if you are physically active, and especially if you’re training your muscles regularly, then generally speaking, more carbs is going to be better for you than fewer carbs. So that’s why I recommend a low ish fat approach, at least as a starting point. And then you can always adjust things if it’s not working for you.

So let’s just again, say around 20 percent of your daily calories from fat and what types of fat mostly polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat, which are the fats you’re going to find in like olive oil and nuts and avocado. And you should limit your saturated fat. You can definitely have some saturated fat and you should have some saturated fat, but I do not agree with the saturated fat orgy that many people are engaging in due to the popularity of currently ketogenic dieting.

And before that it was a lot of paleo people were eating a lot of saturated fat. And if you look at the current weight of the evidence, a very high intake of saturated fat. is very likely to increase the risk of heart disease. And as heart disease is the number one killer in the world, we should really take precautions against it and give ourselves the best chances to not die of a heart attack.

All right, so we’ve worked out protein intake, we’ve worked out fat intake, and one other thing on fat intake, if you want to Look at it in terms of percentage of daily calories, because 0. 25 grams per pound of body weight per day is too high, higher than you want it to be. And just keep in mind that one gram of fat contains about nine calories.

So again, if we say, okay, 2000 calories per day, 20 percent of those calories are going to come from fat, 400 calories from fat divided by nine. All right. We’re going to say 45, 45 grams of fat and that’s grams per day. Of course. All right. Last is carbs, and this is pretty easy. And that you just get the rest of your calories from carbs.

And as far as calculating that again, you can just use one of the calculators over at legionathletics. com. It’s going to be the easiest and quickest, but if you don’t want to do that or can’t do that, then all you need to do is add up the total amount of calories that you are getting from protein and the total amount of calories you are getting from fat and subtract those from your total daily calorie.

Target. And that of course then tells you how many calories you have left for carbs. And as a gram of carbohydrate contains about four calories, you just divide that number by four. And there you go. There is your number of grams of carbohydrate that you should be eating per day. And one of the reasons why I recommend a higher carb approach is research shows that it helps maintain your training intensity and your workouts.

It helps you stay fuller longer, so long as you are eating the right types of carbs, so long as the majority of your carbs aren’t just too much. Junk aren’t just sugar or other highly refined carbs, but it should be again, relatively nutritious, relatively unprocessed foods. You should be eating several servings of vegetables every day, a couple of servings of fruit every day, maybe some whole grains, some legumes, the stuff that our moms always told us to eat.

If you get most of your carbs from those types of foods, you’re going to reap many benefits and it’s Increased fullness is going to be one of them. And there are a number of studies that show that a higher carb approach is better for maintaining muscle and strength when you’re in a calorie deficit than a lower carb approach.

All right, so let’s now talk about how to turn those macros into a, an effective meal plan. Now, what’s a meal plan? Pretty simple. It’s just what it sounds like. It’s really just a list of what foods you are going to eat every day to hit your calorie and your macro nutrient targets. And the reason why I recommend that you start here over a more intuitive method of eating where you don’t have to worry about numbers.

You don’t have to plan and track anything. You just Follow general guidelines or you just eat foods that you’re allowed to eat and avoid foods you’re not allowed to eat is the meal planning approach just tends to work better for most people, especially people who are new to all of this. If you have learned a lot in this podcast, you are almost certainly going to do better with a meal plan than trying to just wing it.

And that isn’t to say that. You can’t lose weight winging it. Of course you can. You can not pay attention to your calories and macros and still ensure that you are in a calorie deficit and you can lose weight. But most people find this as hard to do. It’s just too easy to overeat and it only gets them so far.

Eventually, even they have to start planning or tracking the food they eat if they want to keep losing fat. And one of the main reasons for this is most people don’t know. What is really in the foods that they eat and that they like to eat. Most people are surprised to learn just how easy it is to erase that calorie deficit.

It just takes a couple instances of not just eating stuff that you wouldn’t normally eat, but just eating a bit more of the things that you planned on eating or you would normally eat. Those calories can rack up quickly. All right. That’s really it. Once you have your meal plan, then you just follow it.

And you see how your body responds and you adjust accordingly. Chances are, if you’ve done your mathing correctly, you’re going to start losing weight right away. And it’s going to be slow and steady. The first week you might lose a couple pounds because your body sheds water and a form of carbohydrate called glycogen that’s stored in your muscles and your liver.

But after the second week, especially going into the third week, you should see a slow and steady decrease in your body weight anywhere from let’s say a half a pound to one and a half pounds per week, depending on how much weight you have to lose. And eventually things slow down and you have to either increase your energy expenditure or decrease your output.

I always like to default to increasing expenditure first before reducing food intake, but that’s a whole nother discussion for another podcast. In this podcast, I just want you to understand energy balance and understand how to put it into use and see it working. So then you have the. Motivation to learn more.

And so you can see, oh, this really does work. This is the answer. So let me dive deeper into this and learn, for example, what I should do if I stop losing weight after some period of time or stop gaining weight after some period of time. And what I should do when I’m done losing weight, right? So that would be quote unquote, reverse dieting.

It’s called, it’s not hugely important to follow that protocol, but it. I think it is generally a good idea. So those are things for other podcasts. I believe I have already recorded podcasts on those things, but I can’t say for sure if you search the feed for stop losing weight, you might find a podcast.

If I have, I’ve definitely written about it. So you can find articles for sure over at legionathletics. com of what to do when you stop losing weight or when you’re not losing weight. And then also on reverse dieting, I certainly have an article over at legionathletics. com. I do think I recorded as a podcast sometime ago as well.

All right, now let’s talk about using energy balance to gain weight. So you want to gain muscle and not fat. Now, unfortunately, unless you are brand new to weightlifting, in which case you can go into a calorie deficit and gain muscle. So you can lose fat and gain muscle at the same time. If you are starting out.

thin or skinny and you don’t really want to lose fat. You actually just want to get bigger. You just want to gain some muscle. You are likely going to gain a little bit of fat. Initially you’ll gain mostly muscle with very little fat, which is the Power of what’s called newbie gains, where your body’s very responsive to training, and it doesn’t require as much food to maximize muscle growth as it does later when your newbie gains are exhausted, which in most people, newbie gains last about six months, probably.

So after that things change a bit where it becomes much harder to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, and you do have to accept some fat gain. To maximize muscle growth. And the reason for that is you maximize muscle growth, at least as far as calories and macros, as far as nutrition is concerned, you maximize most effective thing you can do to maximize muscle growth is to consistently eat more calories than you burn.

And the reason this works is your body’s muscle building machinery, so to speak, just works better when energy is abundant, when energy is restricted. I’m going to talk a little bit about what’s going on with your body and how it continues for too long, it will die. Eventually, you would die. If you just stayed in a calorie deficit indefinitely, you would end up dying.

You would end up eventually losing a bunch of muscle after your body’s burned away a bunch of fat. It then would have to start burning away a bunch of muscle and eventually, you’d probably just have a heart attack and die. And the body Physiologically it’s, I wouldn’t say it tends to catastrophize, but it doesn’t know what your intentions are.

It doesn’t know that this is just controlled starvation. This is only gonna go, we’re just talking hey, come on, give me six to eight weeks. I just want to have some abs and then I’ll start feeding you more. It doesn’t know that. So when energy is restricted, And especially as time goes on, and especially if the deficit is large, the body starts taking more and more drastic measures to try to get you to eat more food, to try to get you to reduce energy expenditure.

And it also, it goes into kind of a triage mode with the energy that it is getting and it becomes less willing to. allocate energy to non essential physiological processes. And muscle building is one of those things. So when energy is restricted, your body is just less willing to keep its muscle building machinery again, to use that analogy, firing on all cylinders, it heavily restricts it.

And so what that means then is Again, if you’re not brand new to weightlifting and you want to make sure that you gain muscle and strength as quickly as possible, you need to make sure you are not consistently in a calorie deficit. How do you do that? You just consistently eat more food than you are burning over time.

So specifically what I recommend is that you eat about 10 percent of your weight. More than you are burning every day. So about 10 percent above your total daily energy expenditure. How do you do that? Pretty simple. You just use, I’d say, use a calculator over at legionathletics. com. It’s the easiest way to do it.

Determine approximately how much energy you’re burning and then add 10 percent to that number and eat that amount of food every day. And that’s enough of an energy surplus to help your body gain muscle and strength as effectively as possible. I wish a larger surplus were more effective, but that is almost certainly not the case.

If you were to eat, for example, 30 percent more energy than you’re burning every day, it’s unlikely that you would gain any more muscle than 10 percent more, but you’d gain a lot more fat. And that is unwanted for a number of reasons. Okay. Macros. When you are lean bulking as us. Muscle people like to call it pretty simple.

I recommend around one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. I recommend around 0. 3 grams of fat per pound of body weight per day. And I recommend you get the rest of your calories from carbohydrate. Again, simple, straightforward, see how your body responds. You should be looking to gain anywhere from Let’s just say around 1%.

If you’re new to weightlifting around 1 percent of your body weight per month, if you are more experienced, it could be half that or even less, but what you don’t want to be seeing is four or five, six pounds plus of weight gain per month. That means you’re almost certainly eating too much and you need to go back to the drawing board and see where you.

went wrong. All right, that covers more or less everything I wanted to touch on in this podcast. So just to wrap up, think of energy balance as the master key to your body weight. With energy balance, you can have complete control over how much you weigh and whether you gain weight or lose weight or Maintain your weight.

Energy balance is also the first element of dieting that you have to master, because if you get it wrong, nothing else will matter as far as your body weight and even your body composition goes. The bottom line is you can try every diet fad ever created. You can go back to the beginning of diet fads. So the first one ever, but If you can’t maintain a calorie deficit, you will never lose any weight to speak of.

And if you can’t maintain a calorie surplus, you will always struggle to gain weight, including gaining muscle. And if you can’t maintain a neutral state of energy balance, if you can’t consistently eat more or less the number of calories that you are burning. So if you make The common mistake of drastically overeating for some period of time and then under eating for some period of time.

You are going to be stuck in that yo kind of roller coaster pattern where you are always either gaining or losing significant amounts of weight. And while that isn’t necessarily as unhealthy as some people would have you believe, it’s certainly not fun and especially when you don’t understand why and you don’t want to do that.

Some people do that. Intentionally where they know how to lose weight and they just like food and they just for a couple months They want to eat a bunch of food Let’s say over the holidays and then they want to diet off and that’s okay But many people that i’ve worked with over the years They initially want to either lose weight or gain weight and then They go both ways where maybe they want to lose weight initially and they lose the weight They want to lose and then they go.

All right. I’d like to gain some muscle Definition. So they want to gain weight. So they do that for a bit and they gain some fat and then they get rid of the fat and maybe they’re happy now with their level of muscle development. Oftentimes it takes a few rounds of this for them to reach the point where they go, I have enough muscle to where I think I just want to maintain this physique or maybe just very slowly improve it now over time.

And that’s the sweet spot. That’s really the payoff in the end of it. Everything I’ve talked about in this podcast and really everything I talk about as far as body composition goes, the real end game to strive for is that point where you can now maintain the body of your dreams rather effortlessly.

Of course, you have to put in the effort. You still have to work out and you still have to pay attention to what you eat, but it can feel pretty easy. The perceived effort is a lot higher getting there than staying there. So that’s really the payoff in the end. All right. I hope you found this episode helpful and I will see you on the next one.

Hey, Mike here. And if you like what I’m doing on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider picking up one of my bestselling health and fitness books, including bigger, leaner, stronger for men. Thinner, leaner, stronger for women.

My flexible dieting cookbook, the shredded chef and my 100 percent practical and hands on blueprint for personal transformation inside and outside of the gym. The little black book of workout motivation. Now these books have sold well over 1 million copies and have helped. Thousands of people build their best bodies ever, and you can find them on all major online retailers like Audible, Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play, as well as in select Barnes Noble stores.

Again, that’s bigger leaner stronger for men, thinner leaner stronger for women, The Shredded Chef. And the little black book of workout motivation. Oh, and I should also mention that you can get any of the audio books, 100 percent free when you sign up for an audible account, which is the perfect way to make those pockets of downtime, like commuting.

Meal prepping and cleaning more interesting, entertaining and productive. So if you want to take audible up on that offer, and if you want to get one of my audio books for free, go to www. legionathletics. com slash audible. That’s L E G I O N athletics slash a U D I B L E and sign up for your account.