Crash Course 213: Caloric Deficits

"Caloric deficit" can be a really scary or intimidating term if you've never thought about macronutrient counting before (or sometimes, even if you have)... but it's actually a pretty simple concept once you understand the science behind it.  That's exactly what I'm here to share in this week's episode of Crash Course - not only what a deficit IS, but how to calculate the RIGHT deficit the RIGHT way.  All of which matters if you have specific health goals you're looking to achieve.  And don't worry - you won't even need a calculator for this one :)

Transcript

Coach Dan: Hey, welcome to Crash Course. This is your weekly podcast, brought to you by The LiveUnbreakable brand.

Coach Shaun: I'm your host, LiveUnbreakable, founder and head fitness and nutrition coach Shaun Provost. Alongside me, I have my co-host, strength and conditioning coach, Dan Murray. We're here every single week to give you a Crash Course and something about health and wellness, diving deep into the science behind diet and exercise. In each episode, we look to provide you with the essentials on important topics and give you the best advice and training, mindset shifts and overall healthier sustainable living, so you can make the best decisions for you and your lifestyle. No fluff. Just fit.

Coach Shaun: Hello everybody, welcome back to the Crash Course. This time diving into something nutrition-related, which I know is shocking. It's like I never talk about nutrition. Just kidding. So guys, we're going to talk about counting calories today, but not in a way that you might necessarily think; or, maybe you do.  We’re going to talk about macro counting specifically in relation to caloric deficits or a calorie deficit.  Those terms are used interchangeably and how they can contribute to goals or maybe take away from goals, depending on what you're looking to do this year.  Despite any other weight management strategy that you have, literally losing weight comes down to an exchange of calories: your calories taken into your body is less than the amount expended, that's literally how to lose weight. If you're looking to lose muscle mass, it goes deeper than that, if you're looking to gain what you want is a caloric surplus, not a caloric deficit.  A surplus is where you are taking in more calories than you are expending. So ads promise you a lot of things, for example: if you avoid this food or if you do not eat for this long or whatever it is, you're going to unlock the secret to weight loss, and all of a sudden you're going to shed off these pounds and lose the extra tire on your stomach and whatever it else is that you want.  Diets are great at promising things, but never actually giving you these results, whereas when you base your decisions and your goals around science, you can't go wrong.  It’s just an experiment, the only way to consistently and maintainably/sustainably lose weight or keep weight off is to maintain a deficit and then a maintenance level of calories.  The best way to do that is to understand what you're taking into your body.

I just released a reel on my Instagram, I don't know if you guys follow me there, but if you do, you know both of those may or may not be true.  But anyways, one of the reels that I just put out was about how caloric deficits and fueling your body are so important.  You have to let your trainers know what you're eating, otherwise there's no way for us to help you either define allergies, find out allergies, or finding out how you're fueling your body properly or not properly.  So, for the purposes of this podcast, again, when I say diet, it's not the diet that you're on at is a bad diet, it's going to be the food that you're in taking and the liquids that you're intaking.  Whether that's alcohol or smoothies, etc, etc. And calories are going to be energy, they're the energy that you're consuming from what you're putting in your mouth, and your body has a constant demand for energy and uses the calories that you're giving it to keep functioning.

Blinking your eyes, listening, thinking, moving, breathing, your heart beating, all of these things require calories, it requires energy just to have your body function, and I think that's where a lot of people forget that your body needs these calories, not just to do the extra things like exercise, but to eat, sleep, breathe, and move. When we're talking about macros,  which are defined as macronutrients in our diets, there are the three: proteins, carbohydrates and fats.  They contain calories, they are the main energy sources for your body.  You can be a carb fuel athlete, you'll hear a lot of people carb loading before a marathon.  I had tried to do that a couple of times before I realized I was celiac and it never went well for me.  Now, I am a protein fueled athlete, so I have taught my body to adapt to the protein that I have in my diet and leading up to races or events, I typically have a higher protein intake than any other athlete I know, but I also have that higher portion of my diet made up of protein instead of carbohydrates.  Whereas other people, especially if you are on keto properly and in ketosis, you are using fat as your main source of energy, and you have taught your body to search for and use fat as an energy source.

That's awesome, right?  Regardless of where your calories are coming from, the calories you eat are either converted to physical energy or stored within your body, and if they are stored, they're typically stored as fat.  So if you have an excess of calories or surplus of calories that you're not using to build more muscle then it is just stored in your body as fat.  There are a couple of ways we can use that.  So what it all comes down to it, weight and weight management is really just a balancing act, but the equation can be really, really simple.  If you eat more calories than you burn, you're going to gain weight, and if you eat fewer calories than you're burning, then you're going to lose weight.  So typically, when we're talking about a caloric deficit, we want to be somewhere in the 500 calorie range. Now again, to determine this deficit, you have to know your maintenance number of calories, which is based off a scientific equation of your total daily energy expenditure, aka your basal metabolic rate.

These are scientific terms, but it's also based on how much you're moving your body and what type of movement you're doing, So athletes who are exercising six times a week who are doing HIIT workouts are going to have higher rates than others who are the same height and weight. You have two athletes, same height and weigh: one doing HIIT work-out six days a week, and one doing resistance training six days a week; their caloric expenditure is going to be different, not only are they different humans, but the training that they're doing is drastically different.  So if you're thinking about these two humans, all else being equal, let's say they are both protein fueled athletes, because of the type of training that they're doing, their body is using energy drastically differently.  We know that HIIT workouts are typically more cardio intensive.  Here, it's literally high-intensity interval training, you're using a different type of energy than when you're doing resistance training, which even though your heart rate might spike when you are doing some lifting, you’re burning calories for a longer period of time than when you're doing a HIIT workout where typically, during the interval, you're bringing a bunch of calories in one set period of time, and then nothing after realistically.  For resistance training, you burn for a longer period of time even after you've stopped working because your muscles are still recuperating.

So just thinking about that, there's a bunch of factors.  So it seems like the equation for how to lose or gain body weight should be very difficult, but it's not.  It's based on how tall you are, how much you weigh, how much energy you're expending through exercise, and how much energy you're expending elsewhere.  Let's say you have a job for the USPS, the postal service here in the States. If you are walking around and doing a bunch of that stuff, and also exercising on top of that, let's say you go to a CrossFit gym or you're an Ironman athlete, then you're going to be burning a ton of calories compared to someone who has a desk job and they're working a 9 to 5, and then they exercise either before or after work.  Your job is physically demanding, and so that is taken into account in the equation as well. Your total daily energy expenditure includes all of that, whereas your basal metabolic rate is just the number of calories it takes for you to survive, so your BMR (basal metabolic rate) is determined off your height, your weight, and your age.

You have your basal metabolic rate and based on these three factors, you figure you burn however many calories.  When it comes to athletes, you're going to figure out all of those calories means because your resting heart rate is lower, but for your body mass, your height, your weight, you only need to bring in so many calories.  So when we talk about your total daily energy expenditure, that's where we're going to factor all of those pieces in VMS BMR, it's just kind of there, and then T, total daily energy expenditure, is where we're factoring everything else in.  That’s how active your job is, how active you are, if you're exercising multiple times a day on top of something else, we have all of these little equations that we're doing on the back end for that energy expenditure, and then we're creating this total number of calories per week. Now, this is where it gets a little controversial in the space, because let's think about this as seven days in a week.  When I'm working with my clients, we calculate calories by week, because my athletes and my clients do not exercise seven days a week, even if they are working seven days a week, they are not working out hard and doing these intense workouts or doing intense work seven days a week.  This is important because when you're thinking about the number of calories you need in a day, if I have a rest day on Wednesday and I'm working out really hard the other six days of the week, I'm probably really hungry those other six days and maybe not so hungry because I'm not really expending a lot of calories on my rest day.

So I don't think it's fair to make me eat 2300 calories on a day when I'm not working out and I'm not really hungry and limit my calories the other day when I'm starving to only 2300 when I can kinda sprinkle them around a little bit here and there.  So for my clients, when they come to me with this, how many macros do I need per day kind of conversation, we divide an entire week by seven days and then we play around with that number day by day.  If you don't hit your exact macros by gram every day, it's okay, but at the end of the week, we need to have this number of protein calories, this number of carbohydrate calories, etc.  Because our body is working for us and we need to fuel it, and it needs to be happy, and it needs to be able to do all of the things we're asking it to do. So to efficiently determine your maintenance calories, we have this fancy equation, but now we need to know how many calories you are actually intaking it.  This is where it can get a little convoluted because weight loss or weight gain is determined by how much you're eating versus how much you're expending.

If we're not calculating, aka writing down or keeping track of everything that we're eating, how are we supposed to know, because sometimes we have a snack here or there, we have a bite-sized Snickers when we walk by a co-worker's desk or maybe Burger King, and an extra protein shake that we forgot about it.  Counting calories is a great way to achieve your weight goals, whether that's a gain or loss or in maintenance, it just is.  You need to know what you're putting in your body.  It's also a great technique, they can help you better understand nutrition as a whole, if you've never really paid attention or read the labels on the foods that you're eating is just kind of been like this habit building in your lifestyle.  You might not actually know how much protein you are or are not getting, you might just be assuming like you're basing it off of an influencer or a friend or a family member.

But you might not actually know how much you're in taking, and so that can be detrimental or it could be a positive.  Counting calories is also a responsible way to track your intake.  Going back to this, I don't know what's going into my body, we need to know, we need to be able to see.  You need to be able to notice, be much more aware of what's going into our system, and it's also an effective way to achieve a deficit or a surplus.  We know that if we're tracking literally everything, we know what's going into our body, there's no sneak attack, there's nothing being hidden. The counting calories is not something that we need to be doing for a long period of time, (it’s not because that gets into a whole disorder-eating conversation that we can save for another podcast).  It is something we need to do for two weeks, or maybe four or six, so we can figure out the habits and the lifestyle that we've created for ourselves and start to take steps to change, and if we need to, it's also something we don't need to obsess over it in the same breath and saying, We need to write down everything that we're eating.

If you miss something, give yourself some grace, it's okay, we don't need to obsess over our diet so much, that we’re like, Oh my gosh, that 100 calorie Snickers bar is really going to come back to bite me.  It's not going to come back to bite you, it's not even going to bite you at all, it's a snickers bar. But it’s also not necessary to lose or to gain weight, it's just one way that we can track that we can understand and we can physically see what we're doing, and it's not a form of restrictive dieting. I don't want you to write down everything and be like, Wow, that was so much food, and then not even think about the calories behind it or where they're coming from.  Nutritionally dense foods are what we need to focus on and what we need to stack in our favor in our diet, if that's not happening right now, that's okay, that's something that we can then become aware of it, so when we're tracking calories, it's not a way for us to say, Oh, I don't need to do that again.

It's actually the opposite where you can say, Oh okay, well, now I know that and I can be aware that I'm having more processed than whole foods or more fruits and vegetables, or I don't get enough protein in my diet.  A way for us to acknowledge the things that we are doing well, oh, I am really hydrated or I do better on days where I work from home, things like that, that maybe we just are so used to going through the motion that we don't recognize in our day-to-day, and that's fine. So overall, counting calories can be a really useful tool; that being said, if you have a history of restrictive or restricted eating or another form of an eating disorder where you obsess over what you're eating, what you're not eating, or if you're in any other form of recovery, it might not be the path for you, and that's okay.  Walking away from it and saying, I'm not interested in counting my macro nutrients, I am interested in learning more about nutritionally dense food and maybe replacing foods in my diet with nutritionally dense foods. That's great, and that can be the first step in understanding where you are in your weight loss or gain journey.

So that's a lot, that's a lot to take in. But what I really want to get across is that counting your macros can be very useful for a short period of time, it is never meant to be long-term.  It is not a form of restrictive dieting, it is also not a form of obsessive-compulsive behavior, nor is it something that we want to press to understand where you are in your journey.  If this is a step that you can take, let’s try it out, and if it becomes something to obsess over where you're very distracted by it, let's drop it and just focus on what we're doing at each meal and each snack, and maybe if we can introduce some more nutritionally dense foods into our diet. So from that basic layout, now we have an understanding of caloric deficit and caloric surplus, and then how we can track them. One way to track is you can download an app. My Fitness Pal is one of the easiest ones. It's free, you can just track everything, you can scan whatever labels, and it just kind of pops in there.

Now, I will warn you that they do have green and red labels on things, and some macro nutrients are in red versus blue or purple or whatever it is, so some of that can be triggering.  Now, if that sounds like a trigger for you, just start by writing down in a journal what you're eating, I had one serving of something.  Now, here's where it gets tricky, if you're not looking at the nutrition label on the food that you're eating, or looking up serving size for a fruit, vegetable or a whole food that you're eating, you might not know how much is in a serving.  The one where counting calories servings are very important because that's where we're finding out all of our nutritional values, so a serving of peanut butter is two tablespoons.  I can't remember the last time I opened the peanut butter, drew out a tablespoon and measured.  So if that sounds like you, I’m not saying that's a bad thing.  That’s not bad at all, but just being aware that you're eating four tablespoons of peanut butter could in and of itself be something that you're learning through this process.

That's okay. And you don't need to be upset about it, you just need to be aware of it.  Short of writing it down, understanding serving sizes, understanding where we're coming from, the basis of calorie counting is that carbohydrates and proteins are each worth four calories, whereas fats are worth nine calories. Fats go further in keeping you fuller for longer than the other two do. Which is fine. That's delicious. Why not? But knowing that going into this can kind of help set you up for success, so if you are not an intermittent faster when you're looking to count your calories, what I might do is when I wake up in the morning, I want some immediate energy, so I'm going to stack some carbs in the morning with some fats and proteins on the side.  In the middle of the day, probably going to have some snacks and meals that are pretty balanced relatively for what I'm doing, maybe before I might work out, I'm going to want some easy carbs as well, and then towards the end of my day when I know I'm not going to be eating because breakfast literally means breaking our fast.

At night, I'm going to go between 8 to 12-13 hours without eating. And if I don't want to cannibalize my gains, so to speak, I'm going to want to stack my fats towards later in the day so I can stay fuller for longer, and then the growing of my system will be at bay when I'm sleeping as opposed to you waking up hungry because I stacked my carbs for at the end of the day... And they didn't last as long. It sounds like Danish by the time I wake up in the morning. So another way that we can be aware of what we're putting into our body as those portion sizes, so not just a serving size.  And I'm going to go off on a little bit of a rant here. So when you're looking at nutrition labels, serving sizes are great for micro-counting because you can say, Oh, I had two servings of this and move on with your day, they're not great because they literally are only designed based on one specific kind of human and a specific body type and size, and I can pretty much promise. It's not you.

And so, this serving doesn't serve you. And so when you're looking at the label and you say, “Oh, I can only have one serving", no, you can have as many servings as you want, because what's more important is that you understand what's on the plate in front of you and what its calorie count is.  Not how many servings are in it, so we want those portion sizes to be realistic. Now, let's say you've been going on your life by just grabbing a handful of pistachios and that's your “serving” because that's what makes you happy, but then you need to know the portion size of that handful of pistachios is in order to count calories correctly.  Again, I'm not enforcing disordered eating at all, I just want you to be aware of that when you are grabbing that handful that might be more than a serving size, that's fine. Serving size is just another way for you to understand the caloric density of the portion of food that you have, so understanding portion size is really important as well.  The first thing we would do if we're looking to cut calories is to cut the portion size down.  Instead of having 12 ounces of orange, just have 6 to 8, that's automatically cutting them down, cut your juices in half with some water, that's fine, you're still getting the taste, you're still getting the flavor, you're still getting some caloric density from it.

I'm never going to tell you, not to drink juice, but maybe you can have less juice and focus on drinking those 12 ounces of water in the morning before your coffee or whatever it is.  Maybe we want to add some protein powder to our pancakes.  That's fine if you don't want to. Don't do that. I love pancakes without protein powder, that doesn't make it disordered eating, that just makes it an opportunity for you to add protein to something.  If you don't like protein pancakes, don’t eat them. Don't make them. That's fine.  Think about cooking maybe a gluten-free pasta, it's typically higher in carbohydrates, sometimes they're higher in fats, just look at your label and know what you're putting in your body.  But another way to do it is to swap in a nutritionally dense food, so at first we talked about lowering your portion size, or again, if you're looking to gain what we want to do is increase our portion size, so going from half a glass of orange used to a full glass of orange juice, half of the steak to a full steak, maybe half of the chicken breast to a chicken breast and a half go crazy, but if you're looking again to lose weight, another option is swapping foods for more nutritionally dense foods.

You drink skim milk and you're looking to gain weight, maybe we look at whole milk instead and we add that to our coffee in the morning, or if you are a fast food junky and you love pizza, I love pizza too.  Maybe we want to look at adding pepperoni to that or adding bacon or adding sausage, so we get that protein on top of it, so we have our caloric surplus, but if you're looking to lose weight, maybe we take some of those off so that we have less fat and less protein, and we still have maybe two pieces of pizza instead of three.  Portion size, swapping, and nutritionally dense foods. And then the last one, popcorn is one of my favorite examples, because you can make that super nutritionally dense or super not.  The way I like to eat popcorn, with butter and salt, that's just the way I came, it's what I love. No one can take away for me, and so if you're like me and you just have those foods that you love, that you're going to eat a lot of and they're not nutritious, maybe have less of them to lower the portion size or make them more nutritional dense by taking away some of the negative, so maybe not as much better, maybe you use a different kind of butter, maybe you put less of the flavoring on and a little bit more salt.

It really is all about what else is in your diet, you've been eating really healthy and you feel great and you have no cravings, that's a sign that you're on the right path.  If you're restricting your calories and you are not sleeping well, and you are feeling dehydrated, you're feeling run down, your joints hurt, you don't have a lot of energy.  Those are signs that you are not getting what you need, and we need to take a closer look at the foods in your diet, how nutritionally dense they are, and where we can stack macros to help you feel a little bit more energized. So there's all these signs and symptoms of too much of a caloric deficit, and that's what we're going to look at.  Maintenance calories means that your total daily energy expenditure matches your intake, so all of your exercises, all of your breathing, sleeping; all of that is, let's say, 2500 calories. And you're eating 2500 calories a day. That's perfect. And then at the end of the week, you're eating your total number of calories, I'm not going to do that math, I'm sure it's really easy, but it's very late where I am, and I don't want to do that math.  You have all of those calories at the end of the week and all of those specific grams and macro nutrients, because for me, like I said, I'm a protein fueled athlete, I'm going to have more protein macros and more of my calories intake in protein, then I will through carbohydrates or that I will through fats.  That’s just how I have adapted my body, but for some of you out there, maybe you are a fat fueled athlete, awesome, like probably an endurance athlete, maybe you're a sprinter, I don't know, it's whatever you're passionate about, but if you are, then you're probably stacking the odds in your fats favor: more avocados, more eggs, more healthy fats in your diet that help you achieve those goals, and that's great.

So if you are eating that maintenance level of calories, perfect, you have found exactly what it is that keeps you energized, keeps you happy, you're sleeping well, you don't have cravings, you feel a normal level of tired at the end of the day, you don't have a crash at 2 PM, you're not super tired after you eat a meal, you're not thinking about food obsessively.  You're feeling digestively really well. You don't have any brain fog, so it's awesome, and literally, it probably took you a while to find that, very excited for you and happy for you.  If you do not fall into that, the small subset of the population, do not get frustrated because we will figure it out. Now you're looking to do a surplus in your calories, that means you're over your total daily energy expenditure, and we're looking to gain mass, so again, we don't want to be more than 500 to 1000 over because that's not a sustainable amount to gain, the gains that you get from eating that much, won't last for a long period of time, and we're looking for a sustainable lifestyle here.

I'm not talking to body builders who are planning for a show or an event coming up now, talking to specific athletes right now, but in general, if you're looking to gain mass, over 500-2000 calories per day in surplus is a lot.  If you're doing that, chances are you have a goal that you're trying to reach. 500-2000 is great, and that will get you there sustainably, you'll be able to keep the mass that you're putting on once you get to your maintenance level at whatever the weight you're looking to move to it. So a lot of the time, (this is for lifting) mass moves mass, you have to gain mass to move more mass. That's awesome. So you do need to be in a surplus because you are building muscle all the time, so if you're doing that 500-2000 extra calories per day of whatever macros makes sense in your diet, if you are fat fueled, carb fueled, protein fueled. And the other end of that is that deficit where we figure out 500-1000 tops, no more than that, a 1000 calorie deficit is so huge and it is not sustainable for a long period of time, 250 to 500, very sustainable.

You should be losing or gaining only one to two pounds per week tops, and that's a lot.  I’m not talking about overnight, you weigh yourself at night or in the morning, you're like a five-pound difference, if you're weighing yourself consistently at the same time, every day, theoretically, you're within five pounds of your maintenance weight.  If you start at 150, anywhere from 145 to 155 is pretty normal. Now, if you're at 145 at night or in the morning and 155 at night, Well, maybe that's a little bit on the outskirts, but probably not something that you need to see a doctor about just yet.  But if you're looking to lose weight and you're at 150, but you're looking to be at 135, that's not going to happen in three weeks, that needs to happen over at least 10 weeks, because we only want to lose one to two pounds per week, and that is sustainable.  Once we lose that weight, we can go to our maintenance calories and be fine at our maintenance calories and kinda cruise on by with that sustainable weight loss, if you lose more than one to two pounds per week, let's say it was five to seven pounds per week for four weeks, and you've lost a lot of weight.

That’s great, but when you go to your maintenance calories, your body is just going to store some of them as fat instead of being at your actual maintenance level, so your body is going to be too confused.  It’s not really going to know how to act, and unfortunately, that weight loss that you saw is not going to be maintained and you're actually going to gain weight again once you get to your maintenance level, which is frustrating because you reach something that you are probably trying to reach for a while, and now you're kind of going back up and you're seeing this spike. That's frustrating for everyone. That's why it's important to understand where you're at right now, where you want to be, and a sustainable way to get there.  The weight gain that you have didn't happen overnight, or the weight loss that you have didn't happen overnight. It takes a while for your body to fluctuate, and so when it does to get back on either end of the spectrum, it's going to take a while to get there too.  We're talking about the caloric intake that everybody has, and it's different for everybody, what I cannot express enough is that you cannot look at an influencers diet and what they eat in a day, even if you look like them and you're doing their exercise every day, and eat what they're eating.  It's not going to work, it's going to be frustrating for you.

You’re going to really hate everything about fitness and health because that's not sustainable for you and who you are.  What is sustainable for you is really taking a hard look at your diet, what you're putting into your body and how much you're moving your body. Now, sometimes people don't even realize that I had clients who are stay-at-home moms and they're like, Well, I'm a stay at home mom, I'm moving around a lot with my kids, but actually now when I think about it, I don't eat with them.  They don't have snacks with their kids, because they're busy vacuuming when their kid is eating, or they're busy doing something else, or they're running their kids to soccer practice, and instead of eating something with their kids, they're doing another thing for their kids and that's super common. You're busy, I get it. It's hard to focus on you first and prioritize and then focus on somebody else, so this is what I say: the next time your kid is eating, I assume that you need to eat so ask yourself if you're hungry in that moment, it's easier for you to make double of what your kid is eating than it is for you to say, Alright, here, you eat this, I'm going to go back home and come back and make another one.

You already have the cutting board out to cut the apple and the spoon out to get the peanut butter out, so just get another apple and add a little bit more peanut butter to a separate plate and there you go. That's your snack.  If you're not hungry, you're not hungry, but at least ask yourself that question when they come to you asking for a snack.  Give yourself that opportunity to also snack or to also eat, and sometimes just thinking about it more and being more aware of your lifestyle and habits is what you need to really start to function in that space a little bit better. A lot of times, it's just kind of like survival mode, you've got a lot going on and you just forget to eat. Well, that's fine, but that's also a form of disordered eating because you're not really being intuitive with your system and recognizing the signs of thirst and hunger and energy and all that kind of stuff. So really focusing on that and bringing that back to the forefront can be very powerful for a lot of people.  So the other thing that we can touch on here, is the term effective food.  But that that gets into a whole other conversation and we can probably have a whole other podcast on that as well, where the thermal effect of food in your system matters and that's how fast do you eat or how slow you eat also has an effect on it.

If you drink water with your meal or before/after also matters and all that kind of stuff, but it doesn't matter enough to say like, Oh well, you have to have this amount of this food because there is meat in this amount of this food.  That's not how it works. I think about nutritional density and make it easy for yourself, and then from there, you can dive in and ask a sort of questions and do some sort of research for yourself.  That’s it, guys, that's what I got. I just really, really wanted to bring this up because I think it's easy for trainers, it's easy for people who are in the gym, it's easy for society to say, “Oh, calorie deficit” without really understanding what goes into it. Now, it can be really intimidating when you start, but sitting down and starting to isolate the different pieces, it's not overwhelming, it might be new, but it's not overwhelming.  If you think about the different pieces that go into it, you know how tall you are, you know how old you are. You know how much you weigh. Now, let's think about the amount that you're moving for day and be really honest with yourself, are you moving as much as you think you are, or are you moving even more? Are you eating as much as you think you are? Or are you eating more? Are you eating less?

Sometimes just bringing attention to those habits can be very beneficial, but if you are looking to achieve a certain weight on the scale; first of all, you are worthy as a human, just by being alive, you do not need to weigh a certain amount, but I do understand that sometimes that's a motivation for people, that's fine, or sometimes it's a size on a tag, no one else is going to see the tag guys, no one else sees that tag just you, but sometimes that's a really big trigger for people, so that's fine. And if that's what you're going for, to really understand how you're going to get from point A to point B is by understanding what you're doing at point A that's preventing you from being at point B. Weight loss, whatever it is, right? So being really brutally honest and open and vulnerable, even if it's just with yourself, especially if you're with a coach, is really where you're going to start.  If you guys have any questions on this, please let me know, I literally love talking about nutrition. It's my favorite thing in the whole world. But I hope this helps to clear up some of the confusion, hopefully it answers some of your questions about it as well, and you guys always feel free to reach out with questions, Instagram, email on my website, contact me, however you can.  There's all sorts of ways, and I will talk to you guys soon. Thanks for listening in.

Coach Dan: And if we made you smile or just have to think about something in a new way, go ahead and screenshot post or share this episode and we can get your feedback and share more knowledge with the world now get out there and eat, train live subscribe to our Crash Course podcasts, so you never miss a beat and be sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with it all.