Energy homeostasis

Let's begin.

We've got the foundation, the lifestyle and training, your energy balance, your macronutrients and micronutrients, your nutrition composition, your adjusting and optimizing.

This is essentially the ladder, okay? Now, believe it or not, the foundation, which again, if you start up here, which a lot of people do, right? They're, oh, you know, what should I tweak? These are my calories and macros.

Whoa, what is the foundation you've built? It's probably shit if we're being honest.

This is the lifestyle.

It starts here.

Notice we're not at energy balance yet.

People jump to the energy deficit and surplus way too soon.

And one of the main things and one of the main myth-busting or...

Fun facts that people repeat all the time is energy balance the idea that in order to gain weight You have to be in a calorie surplus and in order to lose weight.

You have to be in a calorie deficit now I'm not here to tell you that that's not true Obviously energy balance is a thing but when it comes to the composition of that weight things are a bit more Complicated than one might imagine and I'll get to that in a second but before that When we learn about nutrition and lifting, we also are bombarded with many different ideas around what is required in order to gain muscle.

So we are told that you need to be in a calorie surplus or you may be able to gain some muscle even if you're not in a surplus, but it makes a huge difference if you are in a calorie surplus.

And back in the day, we would hear numbers like 300 or 500 calories above maintenance.

And if you broke that down in 12 weeks, that means you'd need about a 40 calorie surplus on a daily basis.

So in reality, many of the traditional guidelines for building muscle are overblown to say the least.

But let's get back to what's... inherently wrong with just thinking about gaining muscle as just like an energy byproduct of pure energy balance.

Yeah.

Right? And we, if we t- if we sit there on the low end energy availability side of things, people-- The best way to describe it is a lot, is comparing it to energy balance.

Most people understand what energy balance is.

What you, if you eat the same as what you expend, then you will be in energy balance.

If you eat more, you'll gain weight.

If you eat less, lose weight.

Basic principle.

I like to explain low energy availability as like looking under the hood of energy balance.