Should You Lower Your Calories As You Lose Weight | When To Increase Or Decrease Calories

What is going on, YouTube? Welcome back to the channel. Welcome to the video. In this video, there's a lot of stuff on this board. Don't worry, we're gonna cover every single thing that is on this board, and you are gonna know exactly when to adjust your calories. And we're gonna talk about both a calorie deficit and a calorie surplus and what you would need to do to know when to adjust your calories depending on what goal it is that you have. So I'm first actually going to talk about your metabolism because number one, nobody fucking knows what your metabolism actually is. And number two, your metabolism plays a role in why you would need to adjust your calories for either one of these 2 things. Then I'm going to give you a checklist that you need to run through before you would make adjustments to either one of these plans here, because the number one mistake that most people make— and that rhymed— the number one mistake most people make when they go into their fitness journeys is they make adjustments way too often and way too quickly. Most of you watching this video might not need to make the adjustment you think you need to make, or you might need to make a different adjustment at a different time than what you think you need to make. So, I'm ready to bestow upon you all of the free information that I can possibly give you from all of my coaching experience. But before we dive in, I am going to give you a free opportunity, a free chance to win 1 free month inside of my group coaching program called The Clubhouse. The Clubhouse is where I have all of my workouts, all of my nutrition guidelines. We have an incredibly kick-ass, badass support community of people. It's fucking awesome to be quite frank with you. So, if you want a chance to win 1 free month inside the clubhouse, what I am going to do is at some point in this video, you're going to have to watch the video. But at some point in this video, I am going to ask you a question that you are going to comment with down below the answer to. And I am going to look through the The question, I'm going to look through the answers, I'm sorry, and I'm going to know that you know the question because you won't be able to know the question other than actually watching the video because you might see the answers but you won't be able to know the question. So I'm going to look over the comments, I'm going to pick one person to win a free month inside of the Clubhouse. So if you want to have that, just make sure you watch the entire video and you'll enter a chance to win. All right, now first and foremost, diving into what your metabolism actually is because Again, to be quite frank with you, when people talk about their metabolism, 98% of people actually have no clue what their metabolism actually is. In, in the simplest way I can give this to you, your metabolism is every single function inside of your body. It's your hormonal process, it's your reproductive process, it's losing, burning fat, burning calories, it's building muscle, it's getting stronger, it's sleeping, it's digesting food, it's Watching this video. It's literally every single thing that your body does. This is why when some people tell me— and we're going to talk about this— but when some people tell me, my metabolism is ruined. If your metabolism is ruined or damaged or fucked up, you would not even be alive because your metabolism runs every function in your body to keep you alive. So I can assure you, your metabolism is fine. Otherwise, you would not be here right now. Now, this is what your metabolism does do, which is why some people refer to their metabolism as like being damaged or ruined or messed up. Your metabolism is adaptive. So let me explain this in hopefully as simple of terms as possible. Again, for right now, for the sake of this conversation, just think of right now your metabolism as like how many calories your body burns, okay? It's not really what it is, but for this context, your maintenance calories are your metabolism. Okay? Because again, every function that I just listed, you know, sleeping, digesting food, recovering from workouts, every, you know, hormonal processes, it all requires energy. Energy for the human body comes in the form of calories. And so let's just say your metabolism is your maintenance calories, right? I said your metabolism is adaptive, right? So let's just say for easy math, let's say your maintenance calories are 2,500 calories. That is how many calories your body burns on a daily basis and you would eat 2,500 calories in order to maintain your weight. Again, these are just random numbers I am throwing out here to you. Your maintenance calories are going to depend on you and what your body does every single day. Let's just say for the sake of argument, 2,500 calories. Your body can do one of 3 things. It can be in maintenance calories, which is just eating the amount of calories that your body burns to maintain weight. It can be in a calorie deficit, which means you're eating less calories than what your body burns to maintain its weight, or it can be in a calorie surplus, which would mean you're eating more calories than what your body burns in order to gain weight. And those are the 3 main things your metabolism does, right? So going back to, I said your metabolism is adaptive. This means if you go into a calorie deficit, you are eating less calories than what your body burns. Since your metabolism is adaptive, your body, your metabolism is going to say, hmm, I am not getting as many calories as I need to to maintain this current body weight that I'm at and do all these functions and this, that, and the other, I'm going to adapt and I'm going to downregulate. This is when people talk about your metabolism slows down when you're on a calorie deficit. Yeah, your metabolism does slow down while you're on a calorie deficit. And shocking here, it has to slow down while you're on a calorie deficit if you want to lose body fat, because when you go into a calorie deficit, Roughly about week 3, week 4, week 5, somewhere around there, your metabolism starts to figure out you're eating less calories than what you're giving it, and then it's going to slightly downregulate. Now, should you be worried about this? No, you should not be worried about this because number one, again, it's a necessary thing that has to happen in order for you to lose body fat. And number two, what you have to remember is just because your metabolism slows down, that it's not inherently a bad thing. Somebody who is 300 pounds is probably going to have a higher metabolism and a higher maintenance calories than somebody who is 150 pounds. The person who weighs 300 pounds is going to burn more calories on a day-to-day basis than the person who is 150 pounds. Does that make the person who's 300 pounds healthier or more in shape just because they have a faster metabolism? No, it does not. The person who's 150 pounds or 200 pounds or whatever it is, That person, even though their metabolism might be slower because they lost 100 pounds or 50 pounds of body fat, that person is still in a healthier spot. So your metabolism slowing down is not inherently a bad thing. And again, this is what has to happen in order for you to lose body fat. And some people are going to try to scare you into thinking this is even more of a bad thing because, you know, you won't lose weight if your metabolism slows down. Number 1, they're wrong. Number 2, we're gonna talk about that in the video. Don't you worry, it's the point of this entire video. I'm gonna cover everything for you. And number 3, just really quickly, 'cause I know some people will ask me, no, starvation mode is not real. So anybody that you actually have seen in life that is actually starving, probably not like you and me who are— I'm making the video, you're watching the video. We're not starving. We have food probably readily available to us. We're very, very, very fortunate. Those people in the world who don't have that and who are actually starving, are any of them obese? No, they're not. They're skin and bones because starving and eating very, very, very few calories— I don't recommend you doing that. Obviously it's fucking dumb. Don't do that if you're trying to lose weight. But if somebody is actually starving, no, they're not going to hold on to body fat and be in starvation mode. I've done an entire video on that exact topic. If you want to check it out, you can. But that is for a calorie deficit. Your metabolism slows down. So what's going to have to happen is eventually as you lose body fat and as you know, your, your body weight goes down, your maintenance calories begin to decrease. And so let's just use that same example. If your maintenance calories were 2,500 calories and you were eating 2,000 calories in order to lose body fat, and let's say, you know, I don't know, you've lost, uh, X amount of weight, 20, 30, 40 pounds, whatever it is. Let's just say your maintenance calories then drop down to about 2,300 calories and you're still eating 2,000 calories. That's when you might need to adjust your calories in order to create that calorie deficit and make sure you keep losing body fat. Because if your maintenance calories decrease, that means the calorie deficit that you had, you were eating 2,000 calories and your calorie deficit was 2,500. You had a 500-calorie deficit. If your maintenance calories decrease, what's going to end up happening is your calorie deficit is going to shrink, which means you might not see fat loss progress anymore because of this reason. But while that might be the case, again, there is a checklist that you have to go through in order to know if you're actually at that point where you need to adjust your calories and your maintenance calories have decreased, for example. So we're going to talk about that in a second, but I quickly want to touch on the calorie surplus side of things. And it's essentially the same concept, just reversed. So when you're in a calorie surplus, again, you're eating more calories than what your body is burning, right? Well, I said your metabolism is adaptive, right? So over here, your metabolism slowed down because you were eating less calories over there because your body's eating more calories than what your body is burning. Eventually, if you're doing this in a strategic plan, it's not just like you're eating thousands of calories over your maintenance calories and eating nothing but cookies, pasta, pizza, pancakes, all of these foods. If you're following a good macro setup and if you're roughly 200 to 300 calories above your maintenance calories, like a good actual calorie surplus should go, then probably what's going to happen is your metabolism is going to increase as well. Because what's going to happen? When you increase your calories, you're going to burn more calories through your digestive process. You're going to burn more calories through something called your thermic effect of food. You're going to burn more calories because your body has more calories to push harder in your workouts. And so you'll burn more calories during your workouts. You're going to be building muscle so your body burns more calories. Your metabolism increases because it's using more energy, it's burning more calories. And so what would happen in this situation over here, because your body is burning more calories, your metabolism increases, your maintenance calories increase. And so let's say we use the same example of if your maintenance calories were 2,500 and let's say you were eating 2,700 calories to be in a calorie surplus. Well, let's say over the course of a 2, 3, 4 week span you increase your calories, but your maintenance calories increased as well because your metabolism increased and now that 2,700 calories is actually just your maintenance calories because your body has adapted because your metabolism works in both ways. It adapts down when you go into a calorie deficit and it adapts up when you go into a calorie surplus because it's adaptive. This is also why you can't ruin your metabolism. So people are like, oh my God, my metabolism's ruined. Number one, like we said, no, it's not. But number two, all you would do is just increase your calories. If somebody really did get to the point where, like for example, Sometimes females or very, very lean males will get some negative side effects from metabolic adaptation because they're so lean that maybe a girl loses their period or a guy loses his sex drive and like, you know, they have terrible mood, terrible energy, terrible sleep. They have some negative side effects from metabolic adaptation, but all they would have to do is increase their calories and then their negative side effects would go away because they have increased their calories because their metabolism is adaptive. So same thing over here as well. There's a checklist you're gonna wanna go through in order to make sure you know when is the right time to adjust your calories. So now that we know that, let's get into the checklist first with the calorie deficit. The first thing you're going to check off is You need to make sure that you have not seen any scale weight trend down in the last 4 weeks. Not 4 hours, not 4 days. In the last 4 weeks. So, if you are weighing yourself on November 15th and you're roughly weighing about 199-200 pounds, right? Which by the way, this is why I'm a big fan of weighing yourself every single day. I talk about that in this video here above in the top left-hand corner. You can check it out if you would like to. But let's say on November 15th you were, you were roughly around 199-200. Let's say come December 15th you're roughly weighing around 199-200. That would be no scale weight trending down in roughly a 4-week period of time. But let's say November 15th you were roughly weighing around 199-200, and let's say December 15th You are now roughly weighing around 196, 197. That would be a downward trend in the scale. There's going to be fluctuations and scale fluctuations are normal. So if there's any downward trend in the scale, that means that you are in a calorie deficit and you are losing body fat and it is working. So you don't need to make any adjustments. And so for all of you out there who, when you don't lose weight in a motherfucking week or 2 weeks, No, that is not time for you to make a fucking adjustment. So stop doing that. This is where most people go wrong. You don't stick with anything long enough for it to actually work. You need to give it at least 4 weeks. I can't tell you how many times I've coached people where 1 week goes by, 2 weeks goes by, 3 weeks goes by, and sometimes even 4 full weeks goes by before they lose any weight. But here's what happens. The fourth— third or fourth week goes by and they end up losing 3, 4, 5, 6 pounds on that fourth week, for example. So what happened was 4 weeks went by, they lost no weight in the first 3 weeks, but on that fourth week they lost 4 pounds. If you're good at math, that would be an average of 1 pound per week of fat loss. That would be tremendous fat loss progress. This is why I say you cannot just jump the gun and think you need to adjust your calories if you haven't lost weight in a fucking week and if it's just going slower than what you want. Because like I said, if you're looking at the trends and you're weighing yourself every single day and you can see your measurements, you can see your weigh-ins every single day, you will know what your weigh-ins are. And if you're trending down again, if a month goes by, 4 weeks goes by, And like you're 2 or 3 pounds less, you don't need to change anything, man. You're doing everything right. Keep going. Second part on the checklist. If your measurements have not made any change in the last 4 weeks, then you could potentially look at changing and adjusting your calories. But here's the thing. If let's say you actually have had no scale weight change in the past 4 weeks, but Since you should be taking measurements, which if you don't know how to take measurements or what measurements to take, once again, I have a free fucking video on this YouTube channel describing and showing you exactly what measurements to take, how often to take them, every single thing you need to know for free. But when you start taking your measurements, you will be able to know what measurements to look at and if those are seeing progress. Because again, I can't tell you how many times somebody has not lost weight in 4 weeks, but they've lost an inch off of their waist and an inch off of their thighs. If that's you and your body is losing inches but not losing weight, you have no business adjusting your calories. You're doing everything right, you're seeing progress, and you need to keep going. You do not need to adjust your calories if your measurements are trending in the right direction, even if the scale isn't moving. The 3rd thing on the checklist is going to be your progress pictures, because again, I can't tell you how many times somebody has maybe not lost weight on the scale, maybe their measurements haven't changed that much, but I look at their side-by-side progress pictures that are 4 weeks apart and I see differences. If I look at their progress pictures and I see a difference, I do not adjust their calories because again, their body is changing. What's the point of adjusting calories if your body is changing? You don't need to adjust your calories if you can see a difference in your progress pictures. So if your progress pictures have not changed in 4 weeks and you haven't had any measurement change in 4 weeks and the scale weight hasn't gone down in 4 weeks, notice how it's and not or. All of these things need to be checked off before you go and adjust your calories. The 4th thing is going to be you need to make sure you have been at least 90% consistent with hitting your calories over the course of those 4 weeks. Because if you have not been at least 90% consistent over the 4 weeks, it's not that the calories aren't working. You're just not being consistent enough in order to see progress. So that means if there are 28 days in 4 weeks, you have needed to hit your calories at least 25 to 26 days out of those 28 days. And if you haven't, you have no business adjusting your calories. Even if these things aren't happening, these things aren't happening because you're not being consistent enough. And finally, the last part of This checklist is gonna be, you have to make sure you are counting your calories accurately. I don't know how else to say this. Most people are not tracking their calories accurately. I have, once again, drum roll please, an entirely free video on my YouTube channel showing you exactly how you need to be tracking your calories. Go watch it after this video. It's gonna help you out a lot. But essentially, if you are not using a food scale to weigh your food out in grams, not cups or tablespoons or ounces, in grams. And if you're wondering, Eric, why grams and not cups, tablespoons, go watch the fucking video. You will find out why. If you're not doing that, you do not need to make any calorie adjustments because you're not tracking your calories accurately to begin with. And this is very important you understand this. If you're not doing that, you're just guessing on how many calories you are eating. If you are guessing and then you're getting guessing results, you don't need to make any adjustments because you just need to actually track your calories accurately, get the accurate data, and then once you start doing that, you'll probably start seeing progress from there as it is. So please make sure you are tracking your calories accurately. And those are The 5 things on the checklist you need to— all 5 of these things need to be checked off before you go and adjust your calories. So now that 99% of you are out of this video and you like— this is not you because 99% of you watching cannot check all of these things off. Go check all of those things off first. That's when you would adjust your calories. It's not when you lose 5 pounds or when you lose 10 pounds or when you lose 20 pounds. You only adjust your calories when progress dictates that you have to adjust your calories. And this right here would be progress dictating you are adjusting your calories. So if you are the 1% of that, which there's not gonna be many people who are, but if you are in the 1% who have actually checked everything off, all you would then do is either one of two things. Number one, you would adjust your daily calorie intake by roughly 100 to 200 calories. And so, again, the more calories you have, the bigger adjustment you would make. So if I have a guy, for example, who's eating, you know, he's 6'4, 250, and he's eating 2,700 calories, I might pull his calories down to 2,500 per day. But if I have a girl who's 5'6 and weighs 170 and they wanna, you know, they're eating 1,700 calories, I'm not gonna slash them to 1,500. I'm gonna probably drop about 100 calories for that person. So depends on who you are and how much calories you have, but you would either drop your daily calorie intake by 100 to 200 because what this will do, if your metabolism has slowed down just a tad bit, what this will do is this will kind of like recreate that big enough calorie deficit in order for you to spark fat loss once again. So that would be number one or number 2, what you could do as well, you could eat the same amount of calories and you can Increase the amount of cardio that you are doing because remember, a calorie deficit just means you are eating less calories than what your body burns. And so if you don't want to take your calories down any lower, you could probably add in 20 to 30 minutes of low-intensity steady-state cardio, walking, bike, treadmill, elliptical, whatever it is. You could add in 20 to 30 minutes of that and that will kind of like create that calorie deficit for you. So that is for the calorie deficit side of things. Let's now hop over to the calorie surplus side of things. And before we go into a calorie surplus, the checklist over there, the question that you can answer in the comment section below is going to be— I want you to give me one time that you thought you weren't going to be able to accomplish something or do something, but you were able to accomplish it and do it anyway. So like, for example, Let's say you had one time where, you know, you were walking up to a kettlebell and you thought you would not be able to lift that 100-pound kettlebell, but you ended up lifting the 100-pound kettlebell. Give me a situation like that where you thought you weren't going to be able to do something, but you ended up doing it anyway and conquering and accomplishing it. And if you drop that below, again, I will pick one person and you'll be able to win a free month inside of the clubhouse. All right. Now going into calorie surplus, there's gonna be a checklist here as well. It's very similar. First and foremost is your scale weight. So when you would go through and adjust your calories in a calorie surplus is when, if your scale weight has not changed in 4 weeks, only this time in 4 weeks we are looking for anywhere between a 1 to 3, maybe 4-pound weight increase on the scale in a 4-week period of time. Because when we talk about a good rate of weight gain, Good rate of weight gain in a calorie surplus that is going to be maximizing lean muscle mass and minimizing fat gain, you're going to be somewhere around that 1 to 3, maybe 4 pounds per month. And so if on November 15th you were weighing around 199 to 200 and then December 15th, let's say you're around 201, 202, that would actually be totally fine. You don't need to make any adjustments right there. Just keep doing everything you're doing. But if you were weighing 199, 200 at about, you know, on November 15th and then December 15th you were still around that 199, 200 mark, or maybe even you lost weight, then yes, you need to increase your calories. And we'll talk about how much here in a second. The second part is going to be your strength in your workouts in the gym. If you aren't getting stronger, then that's going to be a problem because in a calorie surplus, since you're supposed to be giving yourself more calories, than what your body burns. You want to see your strength continue to go up in the gym and making progress in your workouts. But if you're slowly gaining weight and slowly getting stronger in the gym, you have no reason to adjust your calories. And then last but not least is going to be our biofeedback. And biofeedback just means things like sleep quality. It means things like workout performance. It means things like energy, mood, hunger, all of those things. And so If you're walking around and you feel great and you're not hungry and you have good workouts and good sleep and good energy and good mood and you're increasing your strength and your scale weight is slightly going up, you don't need to adjust your calories. Everything is going as it should be going. But if, let's say, you know, you're having terrible biofeedback, your strength is not going up in the gym, and you're not gaining any scale weight, yeah, at that point you probably want to increase your calories. And you do that by— Roughly increasing your calories by about 100 to 200 per day. So again, let's say for example your maintenance calories were roughly around 2,500, you were trying to eat about 2,800 calories, but you ran through this checklist and these things are happening. Cool. You would then adjust to about 2,900 to 3,000 calories, slightly bump up your calorie range, go for about another 2, 3, 4 weeks. Get your feedback, get the data, see what's going on, and then take things from there. So that is for a calorie surplus, and that's what you would do. Last but not least, I want to just quickly talk about the bonus tip if you're somebody who wants to lose the last 5 or 10 pounds. If this is you, my bonus tip to you is stop trying to lose the last 5 or 10 pounds, and here's why. Number one, what you are going to have to do in order to lose the last 5 or 10 pounds is going to be incredibly restrictive and incredibly challenging. You're going to have to do things like stop going out to eat, stop drinking alcohol, stop having some of your favorite foods because the calorie amounts in some of your favorite foods is just too high because you're going to have to bring your calories down so low to be able to, you know, continue to lose the last 5 or 10 pounds. And for a lot of people, Unless you're really trying to like step on a bodybuilding stage or get on a magazine cover or whatever it is, it's just simply not worth it to take your calories that low. You'll also have to probably massively increase your cardio as well, which again, most people who live a normal life like you and I, we don't have the time to be doing 3 hours of cardio a day. So it just won't be worth it, number one. But even more so, number two, it's not going to get you to where you want to be. Most people think they need to lose 5 or 10 more pounds to look the way they want to look. That's not true. The way you look the way you want to look and the way you get to that look is actually by adding more muscle. You listening right now, if this is you, even if you lost 5 more pounds, you're not going to look the way you want to look because you don't have enough muscle. The way you look that way is by having more defined muscle. If you don't have enough muscle and you like lose more fat, it doesn't matter. You're not going to be able to See the muscle. So my 2 cents to you would be stop trying to lose the last 5 or 10 pounds. Not worth it and not going to actually get you to your goal anyway. My 2 cents would be start to increase your calories back up to your maintenance calories instead. Focus on getting stronger and building muscle in your workouts. From there, you will then actually, number one, enjoy the journey and process. a lot more and stop freaking yourself the fuck out and exhausting yourself mentally trying to lose 5 more goddamn pounds on the scale. And number 2, you'll actually take steps closer to your goals because increasing your calories will help you be able to build more muscle, which will help you look the way you want to look. And if you're somebody who's like, oh well, my goal weight was 150— who the fuck cares if your goal weight was 150? How do you look? How do you feel? How do you feel in clothes? How are your workouts like? How is your overall relationship with food, fitness, lifestyle factors, all things of that nature? Just because your goal weight was a number, if you don't get there, you're not a failure. It's fucking okay. It's just a number on the fucking scale. All right? So that's my bonus tip for you. Guys, I hope that video helped you. If it did, please feel free to give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel, and again, feel free to comment below the answer to the question I asked if you want to win a free month inside of the Clubhouse. All right, chat soon.