Transcription
In this video, we're going to go over the effects of very low calorie dieting. Are you somebody who's under 1500 calories, under 1300 calories, feeling like you're spinning your wheels and don't understand why the weight won't come off? This is going to be the video for you.
I'm going to explain why low calorie diets restrict fat loss. And then we're going to do a comprehensive case study on how to control carbohydrates for the maximum amount of fat loss. And so in the video, we're going to start off with going a little bit about what metabolic adaptation is, so you can understand the body a bit a little bit better, and then what happens as you start to decline in calories. What happens with metabolic adaptations and cortisol? The interlink between cortisol and metabolic adaptations. How does cortisol affect fat loss? And then how carbohydrates reduce cortisol levels and improve fat loss. And then we're going to go over a very interesting case study with my really good client Mitch here. Um, who was at a 1300 calorie diet on the left, tired, fatigued, irritable, hungry, poor sleep, and just not very tight and that watery look, and how we were able to one, control carbohydrates for him, get him under 10% body fat, and help him understand what his body needs in the form of carbohydrates to stay lean long term.
So, if you guys don't know me by now, my name is Adam Bunnel. I'm an online metabolic specialist, and I specialize in the manipulation of cellular metabolism through nutrition and cellular pathways, um, as well as mitochondria reproduction when it comes to energy pathways. So, I've helped almost 500 men in the last six months, and as an organization, we've helped over a thousand men online get to very lean body compositions, uh, using metabolic priming and uh, strategic manipulation of metabolism. So, understanding that one, when you understand nutrition at a very high level, you can manipulate the metabolism through protein, carbs, and fats. And it's all about the how much, right? How much protein, how many carbs, how many fats. And using these processes, we are able to not only make predictable progress, but we're also able to control a lot of hormones. We're able to control testosterone, we're able to control cortisol, we're able to control leptin, ghrelin, the hunger hormones. We're able to control, uh, inflammation. So, each macronutrient does have a specific role to play. We teach all of our clients this within our program. We teach them how to utilize each macronutrient correctly. But I want you guys to understand in full what is happening within your body when you start to go very low calorie. And this is probably 95% of what guys do when they come to us. They think that it's always lower food, more cardio. Lower food, more cardio, and eventually they get stuck in this never-ending repeated cycle of feeling like crap, restricting themselves highly, and eating as much as a teenage girl.
So, let's kind of get into the video because I want to get right into the deeps and the depths of this good video. Um, and understanding caloric restriction, right? So, when you start to restrict calories, first of all, you start to downregulate the metabolism, right? So, core deficit results in weight loss. Yes. And then eventually you hit a plateau. Then you have to reduce the calories once again. And then eventually you hit a plateau. But eventually you get so low in calories that you start to actually, your body starts to push back at it, right? Your body starts to push back at you. And low calorie diets generally increase cortisol levels because caloric restriction acts as a physical and psychological stressor. Studies have shown that both the act of limiting food intake and the mental aspect of meticulously undereating causes a lot of mental stress as well. Like, think about like very highly restrictive diets like, um, low carb diets, keto diets, where you can't go do anything that involves carbohydrate. When you put very hard food rules on somebody, you make very hard consequences. So, this is a physiological response. It's part of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which mobilizes the body to cope with perceived stress. Physical stress: the lack of sufficient calories is inherently stressful for the body. The body interprets this deprivation as a form of starvation or threat, leading to an increase in the release of cortisol to manage perceived danger. Psychological stress: the act of monitoring and just restricting yourself from food means the mental burden of overconscious food choices, counting calories, can trigger a stress response. And so, we teach our clients how to manage this, how to eat the foods they like, how to go out to eat, how to go on vacation. Because when you have flexibility, you're able to stick to the diet for longer. Because the diet that you can stick to the longest is going to be the diet that is most sustainable, and how you sustain a lean body composition.
So, what is metabolic adaptation? So, metabolic adaptation, also known as adaptive thermogenesis, is a natural physiological response. The body reduces resting metabolic rate, the number of calories burned at rest, in response to weight loss or caloric restriction. This adaptation helps the body conserve energy, making it harder to lose further weight and potentially leading to weight regain. So, metabolic adaptation is directly correlated to your RMR, which just so happens to be 60-70% of your entire metabolism and how you burn food. So, 60 to 70% of your entire metabolism is interlinked between metabolic adaptation. And the more you adapt to low calories, the more your basal metabolic rate is going to savor the calories you're eating. So, where most men focus and where they go wrong is highly restrictive diets and exercise, thinking that that's their solvent. But like we know, just by based upon the reading of the literature, that the more restriction that you have, the harder that you push your body, the harder it is going to be able to stick to long term. So, not only are guys focusing on 5-10% of how they burn calories, but they're even putting themselves in a worse position because it's just not sustainable. Nobody really cares about getting to a 10% body fat. They want to stay at a 10% body fat. And how you stay at 10% body fat is through one, a diet you can stick to, and understanding the education behind how you got there. So, the difference and the one thing that sets us apart as an organization and a business is we teach our clients how to maintain progress. Every single guy that goes through our program, their ability to understand macronutrients goes so far as to be able to teach other people. They teach their family. They teach their wives. They teach their friends how to do this exact process that we did to them. Because the importance of coaching and understanding mentorship is to gather the information. Because where you're at right now is called the information gap. You're out here looking on videos, looking online, looking on YouTube for information on how to get to a next-level physique. But once you have the information, then it's just implementation. Once you have the correct information, then that's something nobody can ever take from you. So, what sets us apart as an organization is the education that we teach each specific client of how their body works. When you understand how your body works, you can maintain progress long term. Once you have the education on macronutrients, protein, carbs, and fats, and flexibility around dieting for vacations, uh, and whatever, you know, social events, then you can sustain that long term. So, understanding that the education behind this is super important, and that's why most guys come to us because there are other programs out there that will just keep you around, sucked in, you know, reliant on them. We give people, and we give men, the ability to understand their body. Extremely important.
But reduced energy expenditure and increased hunger, hunger, and cravings comes with a decline in calories. Obviously, potential for weight gain because if you have a low basal metabolic rate, you have a low metabolism. When you start to eat a little bit more calories, you gain that weight back pretty quickly. Impact on weight loss: this adaptation makes it more difficult to sustain weight loss because the body is burning fewer calories. So, role in hormones like leptin, thyroid hormones, insulin are thought to play a role in, uh, mediating metabolic changes during weight loss. Metabolic adaptation can contribute to weight gain as the body tries to return to its previous weight.
So, how does all this tie into cortisol and understanding how to mitigate cortisol with carbohydrates? So, understanding the interlink between metabolic adaptations and cortisol. Metabolic adaptation and cortisol levels are intricately linked with chronic stress and metabolic disorders often exhibiting bidirectional relationships with cortisol dysregulation. Cortisol, a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands, plays a crucial role in regulating bodily functions, including metabolism, and its levels can be influenced by, and in turn, metabolic health. So, metabolic syndrome and cortisol, obesity and cortisol, insulin resistance and cortisol, cortisol and fat distribution, cortisol and blood sugar. So, cortisol and cardiovascular health, cortisol and insulin resistance. So, a bidirectional interrelationship between metabolic adaptation and cortisol is not just one way. For example, like chronic stress can trigger the HPA axis, leading to increased cortisol release and potentially contributing to obesity and metabolic syndrome. In turn, metabolic dysfunction, such as insulin resistance, can further stimulate the HPA axis and maintain a state of elevated cortisol. In summary, cortisol and metabolic adaptations are interconnected, with metabolic disorders often leading to cortisol dysregulation.
So, as we're saying is that there's a direct correlation between metabolic downregulation of metabolism and your cortisol. You have when you have less calories to support the decline of cortisol to influence cortisol's effects on the body. One, you have higher levels of cortisol, higher levels of stress, but there's a lot of interlink that actually come between that, like increased cortisol and fat mobilization for energy. Once you start to decrease calories, you start to increase cortisol, which can subsequently decrease muscle tissue. And where I see a lot of guys go wrong is that like these very low calorie diets start to really eat at your muscle tissue. And once you start to eat at the muscle tissue, you start to become less metabolic as an organism, right? Because muscle tissue is so highly metabolic and glucose carbohydrate absorbent. So, understanding metabolic adaptations can significantly impact cortisol. Generally, caloric restriction and weight loss lead to an increase of cortisol, which can be both beneficial and detrimental depending on the context. While cortisol helps mobilize energy during times of restriction, chronically elevated levels of cortisol can contribute to metabolic issues like insulin resistance and fat storage.
So, how do we actually subsequently transition this into cortisol and affecting fat? So, the interlink between cortisol and fat loss with insulin resistance. Chronic stress and elevated cortisol can impair insulin sensitivity, leading to higher blood sugar levels and increased fat storage, especially around the abdomen. So, like, you know, the gut fat that you guys are worried about, the really deep visceral fat, a lot of that has to do with high levels of cortisol for an extended period of time. That's why you see busy professionals or like your CEOs and VPs who have very high levels of cortisol have like the visceral fat that's really hard to really get after. So, cortisol can influence where the fat is stored, potentially favoring abdominal fat. So, it's like that last little bit of ab fat you feel like you just can't get off, the very tiny bottom, and you like you got maybe even got like the top abs. This is due to one, caloric restriction or elevated cortisol. So, inflammation: cortisol has inflammatory properties, but prolonged elevation can lead to inflammation, which can negatively impact metabolism and potentially contribute to weight gain. The role of inflammation: inflammation can disrupt metabolic processes, making it harder to lose weight. Inflammation can also be a byproduct of chronic stress, which is linked to elevated cortisol. So, what we have to understand about cortisol and inflammation is that they're basically really the same thing. Inflammation is a buildup of lactate, right? Inflamed body and cortisol, they're very closely interlinked. But when you have high levels of inflammation, you have to understand that the body, when it gets to this point of high levels of cortisol, high levels of inflammation, its main goal as an organism is to reduce those levels of cortisol and inflammation. So, what is it going to do? It's going to do everything in its power, allocate all its cellular energy to go and reduce that cortisol. So, we are now taking away from the cellular energy used for fat mobilization and fat oxidation for the body to go and try to reduce elevated levels of cortisol and inflammation. So, high levels of cortisol, often associated with chronic stress, can hinder fat loss by promoting fat storage, particularly in the abdomen, and slowing down metabolism. This happens because cortisol influences very bodily processes related to injury storage and increased fat storage. When cortisol levels elevate, the body tends to store more fat, especially in the abdomen. According to Dr. Memorial Medical Center, this is partly due to cortisol's influence on insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar and fat storage. High cortisol can lead to insulin resistance, causing the body to store more fat rather than using it for energy. Slowed metabolism, impact on sleep, muscle breakdown, increased appetite. In summary, higher levels of cortisol can indirectly contribute to weight gain and hinder fat loss by influencing fat storage and metabolism, muscle mass, appetite, and sleep quality.
So, how do carbohydrates and having a higher carbohydrate diet influence cortisol levels? How can we use carbohydrates as a mechanism to ensure that we are reducing inflammation and cortisol? So, carbohydrates reduce cortisol and inflammation. Carbohydrates reduce bodily inflammation. According to research from randomized control trials, carbohydrates can even potentially reduce stress by influencing the body's cortisol levels, with studies showing that increased carbohydrate intake can lead to a decrease in salivary cortisol, a marker of stress, when compared to lower carbohydrate diets. This is thought to be due to the role carbohydrates play in maintaining blood sugar levels, which can mitigate the stress response. So, cortisol reduction: complex carbohydrates preferred. The potential mechanism behind the stress-reducing effect is thought to be related to the role of carbohydrates in serotonin production, a neurotransmitter associated with feelings of well-being and calmness. So, how do carbohydrates increase serotonin? How do they increase the parasympathetic state of an organism? How do they influence sleep? Carbohydrates increase levels of serotonin, the happiness hormone, with the improvement of sleep, the improvement of digestion, the improvement of mental focus. And carbohydrates can influence serotonin levels in the brain, impacting mood, sleep, and appetite. So, you know, when you get like the stress hunger, like when you're just stressed from work or like you're just psychologically stressed and like you feel like you want to go snack, like this is the increased levels of cortisol and also serotonin levels and having this effect that carbohydrates do to the overall brain when it comes to the parasympathetic state of an organism, a state of healing, a state of stress release, is directly correlated to like the hunger that you guys get. So, this connection stems from the fact that carbohydrate intake triggers insulin release, can facilitate a transport of tryptophan, an amino acid and serotonin precursor, into the brain where it's converted into serotonin. So, the carbohydrates stimulate the release of insulin, a hormone that lowers blood sugar. Insulin promotes the uptake of amino acids, including tryptophan, into the brain, and tryptophan is a precursor to serotonin. So, increased tryptophan availability leads to increased serotonin production. The benefits of high carbohydrate diets and having carbohydrates in your diets: improve mood and well-being, reduce anxiety, stress, enhance sleep quality. All very, very favorable. And then the biggest one as well is like what you see like a lot of guys with the lack of digestion, the very severe bloating. Cortisol and high levels of stress is the main cause of digestive issues. In most cases, the gut microbiome can become inflamed and weak in times of high levels of stress. This is due to intestinal permeability that weakens the digestive walls and leads to a feeling of bloating. This can happen due to a couple different reasons: high levels of bodily inflammation due to overworking, undereating, psychological stress at work, at home, or just lack of sleep. This outlines the importance of sleep and recovery, as well as the following the macronutrients that we give our clients, as they are designed to lower stress levels, with carbohydrates being the main mechanism that we use. So, cortisol: when the body experiences stress, cortisol is released, which can disrupt the normal function of the digestive system, lead to issues like bloating, stomach cramps, and even more serious gastrointestinal disorders.
So, now we know why carbohydrates are important when it comes to serotonin, stress reduction, cortisol reduction, inflammation reduction, um, and even like improvement of overall gut microbiome just through the actual probiotics and prebiotics that are in fiber and in carbohydrates. I want to show you how we put this into active concept because this is a really great case study on how we actually do this because within Mitch's plan, there's a lot of times that we raise the carbohydrates, we lower the carbohydrates, we raise the carbohydrates for, you know, a week or two straight to reduce cortisol and inflammation, improve overall digestion. And that's how we were able to get him to sub 10% body fat by controlling carbohydrates to reduce cortisol. And yeah, obviously he's, we got him abs for the first time in his life. And like, you know, I'm not sitting here and saying this process is easy, but it is predictable once you understand how to do it. And I'm hoping this video shows you a little bit about how.
So, he started out 197 right here. He ended up getting down to, I think it was 176. Yeah, 176. So, about 20 pounds of fat loss. The benefits of it though is that we actually raised his food first. So, the reason why we raised his food first is we wanted to reduce cortisol. When Mitch came to me, he was in a very low calorie diet for a very extended period of time. He had followed the typical fitness industry BS where it's just like, you eat less and you lose fat. But you can see the levels of cortisol and stress that have accrued on his body. Just like, you look soft, you don't have that hard muscle tissue, dry look to you. So, first thing we had to do is actually increase his calories. So, over the course of a couple weeks, we started increasing calories incrementally with a little bit of carbohydrates, a little bit of protein, a little bit of carbohydrates, a little bit more carbohydrates. And over time, you can actually see this cortisol start to decrease. So, we get up to 2,700 calories, and here comes his, you know, here comes his abs, right? So, we keep going. Here's 25 more grams. 25 more grams. And notice how we're just adding carbohydrates. We're not switching calories. We're not switching protein. We're not switching fat. We're not doing high days and low days. We're not doing, you know, carbohydrate cycling. We're not doing fasting. We're just simply streamlining it, making it very easy for digestion. And each week as he checks in, we add a little bit more carbohydrates. And over time, we got him all the way up to 3,100 calories from 1,500 calories, right? So, he has a lot more definition. His muscle tissue is a lot more defined, right? So, he was at 425 grams of carbs here. And this is was his macros that we had given him, but he was at 198. So, notice he was the exact same weight eating 1500 calories as he was eating 3,100 calories. So, he's not only eating almost, shoot, 15,600 more calories per day, he's the exact same weight because now we have built the frame. We've built his actual muscle tissue. We've nurtured his metabolism. And this is what we call in our program metabolic priming. And the context of metabolic priming is to understand is that we want to get the body up in calories. We want to really increase your basal metabolic rate. And we want to set the frame. So, we'll do no cardio. We'll add a little bit of carbohydrates and monitor your progress each week. And each week we monitor how your body composition changes, how your muscle structures look, how your gym sessions are going, how your fatigue, energy, stress, sleep, everything in between. And we can make correlated data-driven decisions based upon those KPIs.
So, the biggest question I get is like, how do I know when I'm at the top of my metabolic priming phase? So, we see a slight water retention spike, and we're usually tight about right at weight times 18 in calories. So, slight weight spike, maybe in some cases. And you'll see this is kind of his metabolic priming phase right here. So, we started to raise calories and we got rid of a lot of this inflammation. And you can see right here, um, over time, it's like we started to really, really reduce this inflammation. He started to lose weight and he started to come back up. Now, are we freaking out right here, as coaches and as professionals, when he starts to gain weight? Absolutely not. Because we track physical progress and we know that if he's getting leaner and gaining weight, what is he doing? He's gaining muscle tissue, which is good. That's what we want because muscle tissue is highly metabolic. And so, as we start to increase muscle tissue, we start to build this internal frame, internal frame to set the precedent of a good fat loss phase that allows us to stay leaner for longer. Because the more muscle tissue you have, the more it protrudes. And you can stay leaner by having perceived lower body fat percentage by simply having more muscle tissue. So, we get him down in calories. He loses a lot of that. He reduces a lot of that inflammation. He starts to come back up a little bit. But our goal is to start the metabolic priming phase at or below where he started his metabolic priming phase. Right? So, start the fat loss phase at or below where he started his metabolic priming phase. So, we're at 1500 more calories, and he's the exact same weight but more muscle tissue and less body fat. But now we have optimized everything. We've optimized testosterone levels. We've optimized BMR. We've optimized the reduction of inflammation, reduction of cortisol. So, now we start a structured fat loss phase. And so, this is where it gets interesting. So, we start to lower the fats a little bit. And he starts to obviously lean out pretty quickly, right? Just with just a small tweak because we remember, we have now made his baseline calories in the form of metabolic terms 3100 calories. So, as soon as we reduce that just a slight bit, we start to really decline. But we start to come down a little bit. We gave him a refeed right here just to make sure that we were keeping metabolic intimacies intact. Then we started to just lower the calories once again. And you can see like right off the bat, his side shot starts to look really good. His back starts to look really, really tight because fat loss occurs from the top down. And then we start to actually raise food after a little bit of time to make sure that we're keeping metabolic activity in check. So, how we do this is how you can regulate the effects of metabolic adaptation is to ever so often give a slight increase in carbohydrates. So, this will keep your metabolism intact for longer, but it also make it easier to stay on the diet. It will help like with a nice reduction of inflammation and cortisol. Um, and it will overall like just keep you more full intramuscularly and like really maintain the muscle tissue we're trying to maintain.
So, we start to get him pretty low. We start to push him, and I want to see, I want you guys to see what happens. So, we actually gave him a nice little diet break, and he comes back. I think he was on, uh, either vacation or sick. I don't know exactly, remember exactly, but we did give him a small little break in between. When he came back, we really started to push him with going into stairs, reducing a little bit more, and really start to push his body. But this is when his body really starts to pop because you can see his upper shoulder starting to really come in, his obliques starting to come in, his front shot starting to come in. And so, what we would do is that each week as he would check in, we would see, all right, where is his overall inflammation at? Like, um, how is his sleep? How's his gym sessions? How is his muscle tissue? And we might give him like a small little refeed, like a one-day refeed, two-day refeed, or even a diet break depending on the inflammation accrued on his body. On this date in particular, we did a 300 carb, two-day refeed, right? So, how we do that, it's 150 grams of carbs two days in a row because a two-day refeed will allow your body to repair a lot of the hormones that do come with metabolic adaptations. And so, after we do that, we do a calorie decrease. So, we got him all the way down to about 1500 calories. We got him pretty low in calories. And then his body starts to fight back at us a little bit. So, you can kind of see that like when we get down to like the 1500 to 1700 calorie range, which typically we don't really get clients to there very often because we don't need to. Um, some cases that we, you know, we do, we obviously understand that like when we do get clients this low in calories, it's, we have a conversation with them first to understand it's like, hey, we're getting pretty low in calories. You know, we want to make sure that one, you're physically all right, you're mentally all right, you're feeling all right. Um, and so just keep us in check. And, you know, Mitch being the guy he is, he's like, "No, let's keep pushing." Because overall, clients come to us for progress. So, anyways, as you start to get up, we start to hit this like kind of like wall right here, right? So, we start to like toy back and forth with the macronutrients each week. And you can see that like this week right here, as we added 50 grams of carbohydrates, he leaned out significantly in his lower abs. So, that was like a sign for us. It's like, okay, his body likes carbohydrates. Let's give the body a little bit more carbohydrates. So, we end up raising food once again. And then you can even notice right here how he starts to even lean out even more. And so, what we do is we added steps and we replaced them, replaced the carbohydrates a little bit more steps. Okay? So, what we're trying to do is we are trying to manipulate the energy pathways through increased energy expenditure, but also reducing a slight amount of calories as well. So, like for instance, you can see like previously we had got him to 1500 calories, his body started to push back. We started to get him a little bit more carbohydrates, he started to lean out. So, the next approach we take is we start to actually raise a little bit of steps, but keep carbohydrates a little bit higher. And so, these are the small intermediary changes that we do. We start to learn with our clients' bodies. And so, I want you to see what happens when we do this, when we take this route, because you can see, first of all, based upon the last couple check-ins with Mitch, is that we tried to get him 1500 calories. His body started to push back. He started to get inflammation and he started to hit a plateau. So, we pulled back, pulled him back out of the deficit, and then we attacked it at a different angle because everybody's body works differently. Somebody, some people, like you get over 1500 calories, they get super lean. Some people, they start to hit this like inflammation wall, so you have to pull back. And then some people, like you raise a little bit of steps in the form of non-exercise activity thermogenesis, and they break past the plateau. Some people get a little bit more higher intensity cardio. So, the understanding of like what each client's body particularly likes is super important. So, we pull back, we attack it at a different angle. And now we, instead of going lower calories, lower carbohydrates, we do increase in steps. And that's when he starts to really, obviously, as you can see, lean out. He starts to look really wicked right here. So, we start to, we start to like find this pattern within his check-ins where we start to see what's happening with his body. So, we added, we added, uh, 35 more minutes of cardio. Um, lowered food just a tad right here. And then he comes back because, like, you can see the difference between his like higher carb diet and like us trying to push carbohydrates, right? Like his higher carb diet and more steps, it really allowed him to like fill out, which gave him this appearance of a very lean body composition. And then same thing, we lowered it a little bit more to 1750. Even lowered it to like 1650. And then, we start to actually lower the fats a little bit, add a little bit of cardio. And so, we're just like making minor tweaks right here. But this is like where things really got good is on this date because we allowed the body to repair a lot of hormones when we started to pull back a little bit, repair a lot of inflammation. We attacked it at a different angle with some steps, and it started to work. So, we just slowly, slowly, slowly tried to chip away at the carbohydrates, right? Monitoring his body composition and monitoring how his body reacted. And then once we hit this spot and we hit, we reduce the core calories just ever so slightly right here. We hit this new low weigh-in right here of that 176 that you guys see. But this is like where he came at at his absolute leanest, um, with that, uh, body composition looks great, side shot looks great. And then we called the cut and we called it over and we started to pull him back out of that out of that deficit.
So, understanding the manipulation of overall carbohydrates, right? So, when your body starts to hit this like kind of wall and it starts to hit like this kind of wall of inflammation, what you want to do is pull back a little bit of steps and add just a little bit of cardio, just a little bit of carbohydrates, 25 grams. And if your body starts to react well, you add another, another little bit of carbohydrates and then another. And then once you know your body starts to feel like it's recovered, feel like it has less fatigue, then you can try to attack the deficit at a different angle. Try doing a little bit more steps, try doing a little bit more high-intensity cardio, and then you read and react. And so, what we did with Mitch from a context is when we hit his, we primed his metabolism first, which is extremely important, everybody. Like, it's extremely important to know why we did that. But when we attacked the fat loss phase, we started reducing calories and we got all the way as low as 1500. His body was starting to push back. So, we pulled back, right? We added food to reduce calories. We added carbohydrates to reduce inflammation and cortisol. And then we attacked it with more steps, which is a lower intensity state of cardio that's non-inflammatory. So, we attacked it and then we started to go back into it was chipping away at carbohydrates ever so slightly, watching his body composition, watching his inflammation, and we slowly started to push him into that deficit a little bit more, adding five, five minutes of cardio, of high-intensity cardio, adding a little bit more steps. And so, understanding how to manipulate carbohydrates to reduce inflammation is extremely important. You have your one-day refeed, your two-day refeed, your week, you have a week-long diet break. I mean, we pulled it all out. We do it with Mitch. But like, that's the importance of understanding how your body works is that once you understand this and understand, you know, when your body feels a little bit inflamed, because we tell our clients this all the time, is like, we want you to understand what you're feeling right now and why you need carbohydrates. And so, we're able to manipulate that, but also teach and able to get our clients extremely lean. So, he got down 20 pounds, but it was a really, it was a really interesting case study to do because it's not just straightforward. It's not just like a, you know, metabolic priming, lower the calories. No, we had to really toy with the carbohydrates to manipulate and influence energy levels, uh, cortisol levels, and inflammation.
So, anyways, I hope you did like this case study and I hope that this kind of shares with you the importance of carbohydrates in your diet and the importance of there's so many guys out there right now that are eating like 1,200 calories. You would be like, we take about 50 to 60 calls a day. Um, and I would say 20, well above 30% of the guys who come to us on these calls are below 1,200 calories. Um, and the majority of them are under 2,000 calories, which is still pretty damn low. So, like, there is a, there is an information gap in today's industry on what low calorie diets actually do to your body. So, I definitely wanted to make sure that I did share with you that today. So, anyways, if you like this video, like, comment, subscribe. We do videos Monday, Wednesday, Friday over the clients that work with us, over any information you guys want to hear on my YouTube channel. Um, and we cover a lot of high-level topics on this YouTube channel as well. Um, we've worked with, you know, almost a hundred, almost a thousand men online using this approach. And so, these are just the lessons that I have learned and the implementations and strategies that we learned along the way as well. So, like I said, like, comment, subscribe. I'll see you guys next.