Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Q&A: "Eating Back" Calories, Eating More on Training Days, Eating Less More Easily, and More!

Episode Date: November 29, 2019

I’ve churned through over 150,000 emails, social media comments and messages, and blog comments in the last 6 years. And that means I’ve fielded a ton of questions. As you can imagine, some questions pop up more often than others, and I thought it might be helpful to take a little time every month to choose a few and record and share my answers. So, in this round, I answer the following four questions: Should I eat back the calories burned from exercise? Should I eat more on the days I workout? How quickly can I lose fat without losing muscle? How can I eat less without being hungry while cutting? If you have a question you’d like me to answer, leave a comment below or if you want a faster response, send an email to [e-mail]. Recommended reading for this episode: How Many Calories You Should Eat (with a Calculator) The Complete Guide to Safely and Healthily Losing Weight Fast 8 Ways to Improve Hunger Control and Weight Loss Mentioned on The Show:  Click here to shop Legion’s Black Friday sale and save up to 30%! --- Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.legionathletics.com/signup/

If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me do more of it, if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives too, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which is currently holding its biggest sale of the year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now that means that for the next few days, you can save up to 30% on everything in our store over at www.legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com, including our protein powders and our protein bars, our famous pre-workout supplement pulse, and our post-workout supplement recharge, our fat burners, our multivitamins, joint support fish oil, and more. And as you'll see when you head over to the website, everything in the store is currently marked down 5% to 15%. And when you enter the code BRIDAY19, numerals 19, at checkout, you'll save another 15%. And even better, if you're in the United States, your order is going to ship free.

And if you're not in the United States, your order is going to ship free if it is over $99. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do support me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this. To shop and save now, head over to www.LegionAthletics.com and use the code FRIDAY19 at checkout and you'll save up to 30% on your entire order. Hello, friends. It is Q&A time. And that means I'm going to be answering questions from people just like you, maybe even your questions, if you have reached out to me. And if you'd like me to answer your questions, both directly to you and maybe on a Q&A episode as well, then you got to reach out to me. And the best way to do that is to email me. Mike at muscleforlife.com is the easiest way to reach

me. I get a lot of emails and so I run seven to 10 days behind, but you will get an answer from me. And if your question is something that many other people are asking about or is just interesting something that catches my eye and makes me think hey that'd be good for a Q&A episode then I may also answer it publicly in a Q&A episode and if you don't do email for whatever reason you can also reach out to me on Instagram that's the other best place to reach me. I do my best to stay on top of DMs, although their DM system, the inbox is half broken half the time. So inevitably things do get missed, but if you DM me, there is a fairly good chance you'll get a reply. There's a fairly good chance

I'll see it and be able to reply right then. And so there you go. My handle on Instagram is multiple life fitness. And if you don't want to DM me, if you would like to email me, you could still come follow me on Instagram because that's good too, right? Alrighty. So let's get to the questions that I'm going to be answering here. The first one is, should I eat back the calories burned from exercise? The next one is, should I eat more on the days I work out? And the next one is, how quickly can I lose fat without losing muscle? And lastly, how can I eat less without being hungry? Now, of course, that one's in the context of cutting, right? All right, so let's start at the top. Should I eat back the

calories that I burn from exercise? And my simple answer to that is no. Now, the reason for that is one, when people ask me that, they're normally cutting, they're normally wanting to lose weight, and they're trying to figure out how much they should be eating every day. And when that's the case, and somebody asks me this question, what it almost always means is they don't quite understand what they're doing. They don't quite understand how weight loss works. And specifically what they don't understand is that what it really boils down to is just maintaining a calorie deficit over time. A moderate and aggressive even but not reckless calorie deficit over time, that's what drives weight loss. That's what drives fat loss.

How you get there doesn't really matter of course. It doesn't matter if you have a meal plan or just wing it. It doesn't matter if you track your intake on the fly using an app like MyFitnessPal or just eat intuitively and know that your calories are quite a bit under your calorie intake is quite a bit under your calorie expenditure. And as people who ask me this question are quite new to all of this and often don't understand, they just haven't learned about a calorie deficit and didn't know that it's that simple. I don't recommend that they just try to go about it intuitively. I don't recommend that they start with quote unquote intuitive eating unless they are very overweight and their diet

is currently out of control and they're eating way more food than they should be. And by taking very simple actions like just getting rid of, let's say, soda and fast food, they could dramatically cut their calorie intake. If that's the case, then sure, they could just do that. Just get rid of the soda, get rid of the fast food, and they can start losing weight. And it can be a significant amount of weight in the beginning but eventually things do slow down and for people who are starting maybe mildly overweight and whose diets aren't just grossly negligent intuitive eating does not work very well because your body naturally does not want to be in a calorie deficit. It naturally wants to be exactly the way it is, more or less. It wants to eat more or less as many calories as it's burning. And it has different

subtle kind of sneaky ways to encourage you to not be in a calorie deficit, to make you feel like you want to eat enough to make sure that you're covering your calorie expenditure. And so coming back to the question then, one of the problems with even looking at food intake through that lens of eating back calories that you're burning is if you're doing things correctly, most of your calorie deficit is going to be driven by the exercise that you're doing. So let's say that you are burning three to 500 calories per day exercising, which would be a normal amount for people who are exercising, let's say around one hour a day, fairly intensely. And of course there are going to be probably a couple of days per week

where they're not working out or working out as intensely, but on average, let's just say it's three to 500 calories burned per day through exercise. And let's even throw in other physical activity on top of that. Now that's going to be most of your calorie deficit right there. You really don't want to be pushing more than a 500 calorie deficit on a daily basis, because that's when you can get into the danger zone. That's when you can risk muscle loss. You're going to deal with more problems related to hunger and cravings. It can get pretty miserable pretty quickly if your calorie deficit gets significantly above 500 calories, your daily calorie deficit. And so then what that means is if you were to eat back a lot of or most of the calories you're burning through exercise, really what you're going to be doing is just erasing your calorie deficit.

Or you're going to be making it smaller and smaller to the point where it might not be enough to move the needle at all. Another problem with wanting to eat back calories when you are maintaining, let's say, so now you don't want to be in a calorie deficit. You just want to more or less have your intake match your output is it can be hard to determine how many calories you're burning if you're really trying to break it down day to day. So if you're trying to determine exactly how many calories you burn on, let's say Monday, and you think, oh, I burned about 300 calories through exercise. So I'm going to add that to my normal daily intake of my, let's say, basal metabolic rate, plus a little bit more for just basic physical activity. And then on Tuesday, you train a bit harder and now you're trying to estimate, okay, I think that was, let's say 400 calories or so burned, maybe even 500

calories today. So I'll eat a bit more today and so on. That can sound nice, but chances are you're just going to be wrong. It is easier to work with a formula that takes your basal metabolic rate or your resting metabolic rate, and then gives you a multiplier based on how active you are. And that then gives you your average daily calorie intake that you should shoot for. If you go a bit below or a bit above, that's okay. But on average, or you could look at even in weekly, if you take that daily average, multiply it by seven, and that's more or less where your weekly calorie intake should fall. And how you get there in terms of the day-to-day is

less important. That's just a, it's a more practical and it's a more effective way to regulate your calorie intake than to try to customize your intake to your daily activities. And oftentimes when people ask me about it, they are using something like a Fitbit or a similar device to supposedly determine how many calories are burning. But what they don't realize is those devices can be wildly inaccurate. I've written about this. I've spoken about this. I mean, research shows that they can be wrong by up to like 50%.

So don't eat back calories from exercise. Don't think about your calorie intake in that way. There's really no benefit to it. Instead, think about maintaining a good sized calorie deficit when you're wanting to lose weight and maintaining a proper average daily calorie intake when you're wanting to maintain weight. weight or you can even look at it in terms of weekly calorie intake. For me, that would be something around probably 20,000 calories a week is more or less my maintenance. Something around 2,800 to 3,000 calories per day. I know that's my maintenance based on my current activity level. Okay, next question. Should I eat more on the days that I work out? And the answer here is probably not. There's no major advantage to doing this, to cycle your calories, calorie cycling. You may have heard that before. And I've recorded, I believe it was a podcast, an audio only podcast that you can find in my podcast feed, or if you're on YouTube, you can find it somewhere in my channel, just search for calorie cycling.

feed or if you're on YouTube, you can find it somewhere in my channel. Just search for calorie cycling. And there is a place for it, but not for most people. It's really for more advanced weightlifters who are lean bulking and maybe maintaining, but really trying to push themselves in the gym and squeeze every last ounce of gains out of their genetics. And I guess endurance athletes, maybe you could make a case for eating more on the days that you train if you're doing heavy endurance workouts. But most of these people are usually sucking down calories during those workouts anyway. So they're naturally already eating more on those days just to get them through their long grueling workouts so it's not necessary then in most cases to add even more calories on top of what they're already drinking down or eating down during the workouts that said one minor exception i suppose to this advice is if you just like to eat less on the days that you're

not training and that's me I prefer to eat I don't naturally have a huge appetite I'd say I have a normal appetite so if I'm not pushing myself hard in the gym one day I just naturally don't feel the need to eat as much food and so I eat less on the days that days that I don't work out than I do work out. And if you're the same way, and especially if you are an experienced weightlifter, you've gained a lot of the muscle and strength or most of the muscle and strength that's available to you. And you understand that it doesn't matter so much anymore, the little details, because you just don't have much left to gain. Then sure, eat more on the days you train, eat less on, because you just don't have much left to gain, then sure, eat more on the days you train, eat less on the days that you don't train. Again, if you enjoy it

more that way. But if you are newer, let's say if you're in your first three years of proper weightlifting and you still have a lot of muscle and strength that you can gain, you're going to do better just eating the same amount, more or less the same amount of food every day based on whatever it is you're trying to do. So if you're cutting again, just determining approximately how many calories you're burning on any given day using, I mean, there are a number of different calculators out there. You can find a couple over at legionathletics.com. For weight loss in particular, we just put up, I mean, it was an article that was there previously, but my team and I just did a pretty extensive update to it. And it's a weight loss calculator. It's pretty nifty. So if you

check that out, that'd be a good calculator for weight loss in particular. If you want to learn about lean bulk, you can search about that as well. And there'll be a calculator there. And if you want to learn about your total daily energy expenditure, how to calculate that and then manipulate it, you can search for TDEE. We have a number of calculators and tools over at the blog at Legion. And so anyway, the best way to go about it is determine your approximate number of calories burned every day. And then if you want to lose weight, eat three to 500 calories per day below that on average. If you want to just more or less stay where you're at in terms of body composition, shoot for that number as your average daily intake. And if you want to maximize muscle and strength gain, but minimize fat gain,

shoot for about 10% more calories than you burn on average on any given day. And again, just eat the same amount, more or less the same amount of calories every day. It just makes it simple and it works. Hey, if you like what I am doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which produces 100% natural evidence-based health and fitness supplements, including protein powders and bars, pre-workout and post-workout supplements, fat burners, multivitamins, joint support, and more. Every ingredient and every dose in every product is backed by

peer-reviewed scientific research. Every formulation is 100% transparent. There are no proprietary blends and everything is naturally sweetened and flavored. To check everything out, just head over to legionathletics.com. And just to show how much I appreciate my podcast peeps, use the coupon code MFL at checkout and you will save 20% on your entire order if it is your first purchase with us. And if it is not your first purchase with us, you will get double reward points on your entire order. That's essentially 10% cash back in rewards points. So again, the URL is legionathletics.com. And if you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please do consider supporting me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing podcasts like this. Okay, next question. How quickly can I lose fat without losing muscle? And this is a good

question because that's really what we want to achieve, right? When we say we want to lose weight, we don't just want to lose weight. We want to lose fat and not muscle. We want to improve our body composition. And there's only so much fat that our body can burn per day, period, because this is a mechanical process. We can't lose five pounds of fat in a day, no matter how active we are. And what happens is when you surpass your body's ability to burn fat to meet its energy needs, to meet the demands that you're putting on it, it will start burning more and more muscle for that energy. It doesn't want to burn muscle. It prefers just to burn fat. But if you push your body further than it can go on just burning fat, that's the next fuel source it'll turn to. Now, how much fat can your

body burn through every day and every week without having to turn to muscle? Now, you've probably heard the general rule of thumb of one pound of fat loss per week. That should be your goal. And to get there, you should use a calorie deficit of something around 20%. And that's decent advice. And that's generally going to be the case for most people. For most people who just have a bit of weight to lose, they're not very overweight. They're not very lean. They're just normal overweight. They can keep themselves in a calorie deficit around 20%. So they can eat about 80% of the calories they're burning every day. And again, we're talking about average daily here. We don't have to try to get into specifically every day, making sure it's exactly, trying to make sure it's exactly 20%. No, we're

just working with higher level averages. So if they do that, they're going to lose around a pound of fat loss per week. But we do know that people who are quite overweight can lose quite a bit more fat than that without losing muscle. And we know that people who are quite lean, wanting to get very lean, are going to lose less than that. They're going to have to target for losing less than a pound of fat per week to maintain or at least maximally maintain muscle. Why is that? Well, a study that was conducted by Professor Seymour Alpert at the University of New Mexico lends insight into this. So in this study, Seymour went through a bunch of weight loss studies to look at how fat loss was connected to muscle loss. So to look at how much fat and how much muscle people were

losing when they dieted. And what came from this is what Alpert believes is the maximum amount of calories the body can extract from fat per day. And that is 30 calories per pound of body fat per day. Now, what this allows you to do then is to determine approximately how big of a calorie deficit you can maintain to maximize fat loss while minimizing muscle loss. So take me, for example, I weigh 195 pounds right now. I'm about 10% body fat. So let's say that's 20 pounds of fat, 20 times 30, 600. So theoretically then I could maintain about a 600 calorie deficit if I were cutting daily deficit and be able to lose fat quickly, but not muscle. Now, what does that mean in terms of fat loss? Let's say weekly fat loss. Well, if I were to maintain

a 600 calorie deficit seven days per week, that's a 4,200 calorie deficit for the week, a weekly calorie deficit. And as we know that a pound of fat contains somewhere around 3,500 calories, I'd be looking at slightly more than a pound of fat loss per week. And so then according to Alpert's research, that is what I should shoot for. That should be my target, about a pound of fat loss per week. And so then according to Alpert's research, that is what I should shoot for. That should be my target, about a pound of fat loss per week. And if I do that, then I will retain as much muscle as possible. I may not be able to lose no muscle depending on how long I'm cutting for and how lean I'm looking to get and also how I manage my calorie deficit as I get leaner, because as I lose fat, the size of my calorie deficit has to shrink as well.

But I can say from personal experience, having dieted down to pretty low body fat levels a number of times, if you do it right, the muscle loss is so negligible. I mean, I couldn't tell if I lost any muscle. I lost maybe a little bit of strength over the course of a couple months on my big lifts, but you'd expect that. And I looked great by my standards. So if I did lose any muscle, it wasn't enough for me to care. I should also mention that Alpert's findings and recommendations are in line with other researchers like Dr. Eric Helms, who is on the scientific advisory board for my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics. And according to his research

and his experience, not only with himself, but having coached many, many, many natural bodybuilders, the weekly rate of weight loss to shoot for should be a half a percent to one percent of body weight per week based on how lean you are starting out. The leaner you are, the less you should be looking to lose every week. Now you apply that to me and I should be much closer to the half a percent of body weight per week than 1% just because I'm already fairly lean. And so again, it comes out to somewhere around a pound of fat loss per week, maybe a little bit more by Eric's recommendations, which again are right in line with Alpert's. And just quickly, I mentioned this tool earlier, but I'm going to mention it again because it's

cool and it's useful. If you want to learn more about how quickly you should be looking to lose weight, how many calories you should be eating every day to do that, how long it's going to take to reach your target body weight or target body fat percentage, head over to Legion Athletics and check out the weight loss calculator or just search online for legion weight loss calculator and it will come up okay the final question for this q a how can i eat less without being hungry something i get asked fairly often from people who are cutting and the best way to do this the best way to reduce hunger is to change your diet and this is particularly true when you are cutting, when calories are restricted, because your body is not happy about it. Your body does not want to be in a calorie deficit.

And so if you're not paying attention to the foods that you're eating and you're not getting enough fiber, for example, or you're not getting enough water through food and just drinking, and you are eating too many foods that are high in calories but not very satiating, you're going to have a very hard time of it. You are going to be hungry a lot and you are going to be struggling with cravings often. And so then the tip, the hack for cutting without all the drama of hunger and cravings is to eat plenty of fiber-rich foods like fruits and vegetables and whole grains, drink plenty of water and watch out for generally it's either highly processed foods that contain a lot of calories but aren't very filling or just

foods that contain a lot of fat that also can be very calorie dense, but not very satiating. And this, by the way, is one of the major disadvantages of the IIFYM way of going about cutting the, if it fits your macros, eat whatever sounds good to you. Just make sure that you are eating enough to stay within your calorie and macronutrient targets? Well, the problem is when you eat a bunch of then peanut butter and candy and pop tarts and other highly processed tasty foods, and maybe even less processed, less tasty stuff like bread, for example, or other baked goods, you can lose weight. Of course, If you do stick to your calories and macros, you're going to lose weight, but you are going to have a rough time. Unless you just

naturally have very little appetite, you are going to be hungry often, especially when in the hour or so leading up to the normal times when you eat, it can become, it can drive you to distraction actually. And you'd have a much easier time if you just replaced most of those calories with stuff like vegetables and fruits and whole grains and legumes and lean protein. If you got the majority of your calories when you're cutting from those foods and then took, let's say 10 to 20% of your calories to give over to whatever, I don't care if it's candy or peanut butter or pop tarts or bread or whatever. If you do that, you'll be able to get the satisfaction of eating stuff that's just tasty. It's just nice to eat without having to suffer for it. Oh, and one other aspect of appetite control that I want to mention

is getting enough sleep. This is a critical part of it and an often overlooked part of it. If you do not sleep enough, you are going to generally be more hungry. This has been shown in a number of studies and it has been shown to impair weight loss because when people are hungrier, they tend to eat more and that of course then diminishes or even eliminates calorie deficits altogether. And on the other side of the coin, if you sleep enough, you will not only have better appetite control, you will not only feel fuller from the foods that you eat and have less of a desire to eat food, you'll also retain more muscle while you cut. So make sure that you are sleeping enough. Shoot for eight hours per night, at least eight hours in bed per night, because you might

need a little bit less. You might need a little bit more, but eight hours is a good sweet spot for most people. Okay. Well, that's it for this Q and A. I hope you found it helpful. And if you did, please do give it a like and leave a comment down below, letting me know what you thought. And again, if you want to have me answer your questions, email them to me, mikeatmuscleforlife.com. That's the best way or DM them to me on Instagram, Muscle for Life Fitness. And you will hear back from me. You definitely will if it's email, and you will hear back from me. You definitely will if it's email and you probably will if it's Instagram. Again, Instagram's inbox is finicky. Sometimes it works great. Sometimes it doesn't. But if your question also is something that other

people are asking, or if it just strikes me as something that would be a good question to answer on a Q&A, then I will answer it publicly as well. If you like what I'm doing here on the podcast and elsewhere, and if you want to help me do more of it, if you want to help me help more people get into the best shape of their lives too, please do consider supporting my sports nutrition company, Legion Athletics, which is currently holding its biggest sale of the year for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now that means that for the next few days, you can save up to 30% on everything in our store over at www.legionathletics.com. That's L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com, including our protein powders

and our protein bars, our famous pre-workout supplement pulse, and our post-workout supplement recharge, our fat burners, our multivitamins, joint support, fish oil, and more. And as you'll see when you head over to the website, everything in the store is currently marked down 5 to 15%. And when you enter the code BRIDAY19, numerals 1-9, at checkout, you'll save another 15%. And even better, if you're in the United States, your order is going to ship free. And if you're not in the United States, your order is going to ship free if it is over $99. So again, if you appreciate my work and if you want to see more of it, please do support me so I can keep doing what I love, like producing more podcasts like this. legionathletics.com, L-E-G-I-O-N athletics.com and use the code Friday19, numerals one nine at checkout, and you'll save up to 30% on your entire order.

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. I hope you found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and you don't mind doing me a favor could you please leave a quick review for the podcast on itunes or wherever you are listening from because those reviews not only convince people that they should check out the show they also increase the search visibility and help more people find their way to me and to the podcast and learn how to build their best body ever as well. And of course, if you want to be notified when the next episode goes live, then simply subscribe to the podcast and whatever app you're using to listen, and you will not miss out on any of the new stuff that I have coming. And last, if you didn't like something about the show, then definitely shoot

me an email at mike at muscleforlife.com and share your thoughts. Let me know how you think I could do this better. I read every email myself and I'm always looking for constructive feedback. All right. Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon.