So I wanted to throw in some bonus lessons
and material here to give you a little bit more
of a starting point or a platform.
If you're going to try
and take yourself through a, a transformation
or you want a little bit more kind
of background knowledge on how this is going to work,
if you're gonna move forward
with someone coaching you through the process.
First thing we need to do is set our targets.
And this is much more than just picking a calorie level.
This is starting with an honest assessment of
where you are now, where you would like to be,
and then a realistic timeline for achieving that.
Not everyone can get to their ideal physique in 90 days,
120 days, you know, six months.
It might take longer. Or maybe you're a person who's already
leaning, it's gonna take you eight weeks
and congratulations.
So we need to look at it is easier
and faster to lose body fat.
The more body fat you have, you have more stored energy
you can afford a greater relative deficit
and still preserve muscle tissue,
and that's a very important factor.
Maximizing fat loss should be in tandem
with the goal of preserving muscle.
We do not want to lose muscle, if at all possible.
It's metabolically active tissue.
It keeps you healthy, strong injury prevention,
tons of benefits to muscle tissue,
which you probably already know.
We don't wanna sacrifice all that hard work
and just end up a smaller version of ourselves.
We wanna look leaner and maintain that tissue.
The next goal you could have would be kind
of what we call the recomp.
So I have fat to lose,
but I also wanna build a little bit of muscle.
This means we're not gonna necessarily go into as extreme
of deficits for as long period of time.
We might be staying closer to that maintenance window,
or maybe we're actually adjusting our nutrition back
and forth between aggressive deficit and maintenance
or slightly over maintenance even,
and focusing on a little bit of muscle gain.
So there's a lot of ways we could structure a long-term
transformation depending on
what your top priorities are and where you're starting.
And then we have performance goals.
In addition to maybe losing
fat loss, you're like, you know what?
I just wanna be, I wanna have the conditioning level
to do X, Y, z, play with my kids and not get tired.
You know, go through the ball around, walk up
and down flights of stairs without, you know,
feeling huffing and puffing or sweating at the office,
or whatever that case may be.
We can prioritize all
of those things when we're constructing this plan.
So if you haven't done this
before, successfully picking arbitrary measures,
like losing 1% of body fat per week might be unrealistic.
'cause as I mentioned, is you get leaner, the rate
of fat loss decreases.
So your rate of fat loss is not going to be linear,
most likely the entire time.
So then if you're not dialed in,
this process does take longer with trial
and error, which is why having a coach can help speed these
things up quite a bit because they have the knowledge
and experience to, you know,
look at all those biofeedback markers,
adjust the training plan, et cetera.
They have the knowledge to already do that.
Other metrics you can look at, um, that for people
who are creating these transformations is maybe it's just I
want to fit into a specific set of, uh, specific pair
of clothes, perfectly fine,
or, you know, sustained energy throughout the day.
So once we have kind of what our personal set
or personal starting point is
and the goal we want to achieve,
now we can start looking at calories.
Now this is that maintenance window
that I talked about back in the, the prep work section
and kind of throughout the other modules.
This understanding
of maintenance calories is not a specific calorie number,
it is a window,
meaning if someone has a small maintenance window,
they could eat, let's say anywhere from 2200 calories to
2,400 calories
and their body weight doesn't change at all anywhere in
that their body will naturally adjust metabolically
or with their knee or whatever,
and their body weight will stay the same.
You might have other people that maybe on the low end then
go to 2200,
but they could eat up to 26, 27, 2800 calories
and stay relatively about the same.
Now, I don't have an exact reason as to why this is,
but I know that it is throughout experience with all
of my past clients and myself included,
this varies from person to person.
So we need to assess what that window is,
at least generally, so
that when we make our first calorie adjustment
for a deficit, we want to be
outside that maintenance window.
We wanna be in the deficit zone.
If we don't adjust it enough,
we just end up at the bottom of the maintenance window.
So then you're getting just a little less energy
and eating less without seeing any benefit
and that's not what we want.
So we need to understand where this, you know, range is
for someone so we can make more accurate
adjustments right off the bat.
During the transformation phase, we're not, you know,
wondering why things aren't working
and just have to keep moving down
and like, you know, a hundred, 200 calorie increments.
We can make that first big jump
and know that we're right on track.
The next one is just rehashing one
that we touched on earlier is making sure that we know
where we don't want to go.
That is just as important as knowing where to go.
So physiological rate to fat loss.
If we try to exceed that,
which is this little point down here,
we're not losing fat any faster.
We're basically just sacrificing muscle tissue
and making ourselves miserable for
no, no additional benefit.
So just touching again, the best way to
increase the deficit you can handle increasing,
improving your conditioning and mitochondrial health.
This will bring us to our next section of energy flux,
which you may remember I mentioned early on.
This is what it means.
If we are looking at this, these columns right here,
these two low and high have the same deficit, right?
The amount we're burning is the same amount
greater than what we're intaking.
Let's say it's 200 calories.
The person on the left, they might be eating so little,
they're risking nutrient
deficiencies 'cause they're not eating very much.
They're gonna be hungrier all the time
because they're eating less and they're gonna have a lower
thermic effect of food.
Your body burns calories to digest food, protein, carbs,
not as much for fat.
If we're the person on the right, it's gonna be a lot easier
to maintain our conditioning because we're training more.
We can move more, we can push our bodies more,
we can perform better.
You're also not gonna be
as hungry 'cause we're eating more food.
We're gonna get a greater thermic effect of food,
which means we're burning more calories
simply by eating more.
And it's gonna be much easier to maintain
or build lean muscle mass.
We're at less of a risk of losing lean muscle tissue
because we are above this, uh, minimum nutrient intake line.
And you're gonna have better energy, mood and sleep.
So we want to try and aim for this higher
overall energy flux.
And the energy flux is if you were to add intake
and burn numbers together.
So let's say I am, you know, burning whatever, 2200 calories
and I'm taking in 2000 calories.
My energy flux is 4,200, maybe this one,
I am burning 3,200 calories and consuming 3000.
So now it's 6,200, but I'm in the same deficit.