Strength Beyond the Scale: Women’s Physique Coaching, Hormones, Metabolic Health & Stress with Brandon DaCruz

23:09I have a lot of women that come to me and they're training in a facet state. And now we can debate the cortisol secretion of facet training and this, that, and the other, like many people are going to get into the mechanisms. But really when it comes down to it, if you look at outcome data on people in resistant training studies, facet versus fed training. We see better outcomes in Fed trainings for resistant training in particular. Aerobic training is a completely different animal, but we're seeing better outcomes. So when I'm able to take someone for eight to 12 weeks, increase their training performance, get them progressively overloading, following a progressive resistance training program where they're actually getting sufficient mechanical tension on their bodies.

23:42They're actually training in a manner that's conducive to maximizing muscle growth. Now they're increasing their lean body mass and generally staying around the same weight. So they're re-comping, but really, if you think about it, When you increase lean mass and you stay around the same weight, that means your body fat percentage without even going through a fat loss phase, you've decreased your body fat percentage. So a lot of times if you were to look and I would refer anyone to look at my Instagram at Brandon DeCruz underscore, you could see primer phase transformations and these people look leaner and look more muscular.

24:08And that's because they've recomp during that phase. So it isn't a period of stagnancy. It's just, we're not going to be chasing fat and weight loss on the scale because you already have adaptations that are not, are not going to be conducive for you to actually move forward and lose a substantial amount of weight. If you come to me with a down-regulated thyroid or you have low sex hormones or you've lost your period with many of the women that come to me, they have gone through chronic dieting cycles where they're in hypothalamic amenorrhea. I mean, they've went three or more months without a consistent menstrual cycle.

24:34We need to resolve that first and take off that bottleneck from your physiology before we push forward for any more fat loss. That's super important. I can't believe that your partner at the time went, what, six months? Yeah, so I'm going to be completely frank with you. I've had, I've had women up to, so I actually had a case study recently. I have a woman up in Canada that I've been working with. It took her 10 years to restore a menstrual cycle. And we worked together for a year and a half just to get it back online. And that was due to many things. She had an eating disorder early in life.

25:05I have a client that actually, I just put this up on my story today. Coincidentally, that it was the caption of the story was that if you had told me 15 years ago, when I'm on the gym floor training meatheads, that my, the highlight of my week would be restoring someone's menstrual cycle and having a client, you know, email me that I would have never believed. But at this point in my life, these are some of the highlights of my week. So I had a client recently that had lost her period. She's a, has a very large social media influence and following, and she was trying to stay lean for the grand.

25:32That's it is what it is. And she had lost her period for three and a half years. She just got it back yesterday. So this is a huge accomplishment for her. And then I've had another woman and these are just, I've had, I've helped dozens of women restore their menstrual cycle, but these are specific cases that keep, that stick out of my head. I had a woman that was actually 40 when she lost her cycle. She was a competitor and her coach had told her, Hey, this is part of the process. And very similar to my partner was 10 years ago. However, when it didn't come back in a year or two, she was 42 years old.

25:57She went to her PCP and he told her that she had went through menopause early. So she had went through menopause at 42. Oh, I'd be so mad. Here's this story. So at 48, she starts working with me and it was the first time in her life where she was sufficiently fueled. I ran blood work every three to six months, I was looking at hormonal patterns, markers, physiological, you know, biofeedback, looking at a resting heart rate. She was in a sympathetically driven state. So when this woman came to me, she had a resting heart rate of like 81. So she was in sympathetic overdrive. So very stressed, high cortisol secretor, all these, these things.

26:30And she had stayed very, very lean for very long, had used androgens. There was a bunch of things in the system that were really confounding whether she had hypothalamic amenorrhea or she was menopausal, But she came to me and told me, Brandon, I'm menopausal. Okay. Not going to argue with you. So six months in, I get a voice note and she's hysterically crying. She had her first period. I worked with her for another two years. She had periods into her fifties. So that was a misdiagnosis just based on the fact that her initial coach had told her, Hey, that's normal to lose your period. He had done nothing to restore it or to try to get her hypothalamic signaling back online and hadn't educated her to the point that, Hey, listen, this is something that may come from being in low energy availability, but then we got to get you out of this state, get you out of a deficit, get you out of a period of active weight loss and focus on restoring your menstrual cycle.

27:12Because we even see in the literature, there's a great study by Holiday, and it's a case study on a female athlete who lost her cycle about 12 weeks into a contest prep phase. It took her 72 weeks to get back. And the reason for it was she was staying way too lean during her actual post contest phase. So we have to be very specific. So the phases and the progression, the duration that I take someone through is based on that individual's specific the case. Do you only work with physique competitors? Absolutely not. So I have a wide demographic. So I used to work with very, I would say predominantly with physique athletes.

27:45And in 2019, I stopped competing myself. And then since then, I no longer work with as many, I used to work with a lot of professional physique athletes, but now it's mostly lifestyle clients. Like I said, the best way to encompass who I work with are high performers. And it doesn't have to be a high performer just in the gym or in their physique or in competition. I work actually much more with lifestyle individuals that I think what I can relate to with a lot of clients that I work with now is they're type A individuals. They burn the candle at both ends and we can relate very much so because I was the person that I was, Haley, I was telling you this offline.

28:16I spent 10 years in a corporate structure where I was working in Manhattan while I was building my nutrition coaching business. So I was a national sales director. I flew all over the country. There was many years I was on the road 40 weeks a year trying to enhance my physique. And I was competing at that time. I was burning the candle on every end that you could think of. At the same time, I was staying up every single night when I would get home to hotels or I'd get back from a trip or I would be waking up at 3 a.m., which I still do to this day, but that's for a different reason. I'd be waking up in the morning to do client check-ins because I was trying to build a coaching business for 10 years while running a massive company as a sales director for those 10 years.

28:49So I can very much relate to the individuals that are trying to do it all and they want to do it all. And I get that, but we really have to prioritize specific goals. And that's why I use a phasing approach where each phase has a specific intention and goal. We stay focused on that and then we move on to the next and each single phase will potentiate the results of the next one. Why do you wake up at 3 a.m.? I just have to know. So I was saying this to Haley off air, Laura, but I have about 30 to 40 % of my clients currently are international. So I have a lot of clients in New Zealand and in Australia, and I want to be able to interact with them and communicate on a time basis where I can still get through to them.

29:23So for instance, a lot of my clients internationally are between eight to 14 hours ahead of me. So basically the latest I could really wake up is 3am to be able to get in touch with them before they go to bed or before they have family time and things like that. And I'm someone that I really, I really pride myself on great communication and being really like in the trenches with my clients. So I find that this is the best way for me to set myself up and set them up for success. So when do you go to sleep? I go to sleep at 7pm. So I know that's quite drastic. I was going to say, you have to get the eight hours.

29:52because you do not look tired or sleep deprived. That's what I'm like. No, I've been up since 3 a.m. I've been up since 3 a.m. today and I'm good to go. No, I have a very dialed and circadian rhythm. So I had some sleep issues early on because I was obviously traveling all around the country, but I've really dialed that in. That's something I very much focus on with clients. Like I said, it's not just about nutrition. It's not just about training. It's about an all-encompassing lifestyle design and really trying to optimize things. So I found that specific sleep hygiene routines or even supplementation, things of that sort can really enhance someone's ability to get quality sleep and to get the sufficient quantity that they need.

30:26And that's going to have downstream ramifications and implications on everything. That's going to help with appetite because we know that when you have short sleep, it increases appetite. We see in certain studies up to 500 to 600 calories increase in your ab libitum. So your natural eating to satiety intake after a day of short sleep, we see that it disrupts your fat loss to lean mass retention during a fat loss phase. So there's a two week study by not, not Narudan, um, no, no, no, it's a weird last name, but they looked at the outcomes of 5.5 hours of sleep. So that was short sleep versus 8.5 hours of sleep during a deficit.

31:00And what they found was it was a flip-flop in the actual amount of lean mass and fat mass that was lost. So I believe in the, um, the short sleep condition, they'd lost about 55 % more of their weight, same amount of weight. So it was the same deficit equated 55 % more weight from lean mass than from fat mass that, and then in the other equation. So really what we see is that there could be drastic differences if you don't get enough sufficient sleep quality and sleep quantity. All right. So what would you do with a client that wasn't sleeping well? Like me. Take them out of a deficit. Number one, I would imagine.

31:34Yeah. So Laura, what is your case? We can go through a case study. You're the avatar, Laura. I know exactly. Well, I have a 21 month old and so my sleep is getting better, but let's pretend it was back 16 months old. I mean, I'm up three times a night. All right. So we're going to try to optimize within what's in your control. So I'm a big advocate of, I like to develop plans and strategies for clients that meet in the middle between what's optimal for that person's goal. And then what's also practical for their lifestyle. Because if I just told you, Hey, put blue blockers on or a mask on and earplugs and just, you know, knock out and not take care of your child, that would get you better sleep, but that's not going going to do anything like that's going to impair your actual real life.

32:18So that's where we would look at a full daily design. So we look at setting up your circadian rhythm in a more optimized manner. So first thing we're going to do is early in the morning, make sure you get sufficient sunlight. Now, if you are someone that either you wake up very early like myself and you can't get sunlight because it's 3am in Tennessee, or you just can't get outside because you're taking care of your child, we can look at a lux light, which is going to have essentially, it's a light therapy lamp, do it for 30 minutes. And it mimics what you would get from outdoor exposure and those essentially light hitting the photons in the back of your eyes.

32:46That's going to set up your circadian rhythm. It's also going to suppress melatonin production and increase cortisol production in the morning. Now we want cortisol higher in the morning. There's something called the cortisol awakening response, which a lot of people, a lot of women especially have adrenal dysregulation essentially. So a lot of times I'll see even on whether it be a Dutch test or a 24 hour cortisol analysis where they'll have high cortisol in the evening and low cortisol in the morning. So this essentially leads to a patterning where they're tired, but wired at night, but they're groggy in the morning.

33:14They feel like they get sleep in all morning, but they don't have the time or the schedule to do so. So we work on setting up your circadian rhythm in that manner. Two to three hours before bed, we would stop eating. So we would make sure that you had a sufficient meal, but that you weren't having anything high in saturated fat. You were having some type of meal that would be comprised of protein, obviously to stimulate muscle protein synthesis throughout the night. Actually, high glycemic carbs are actually linked to better sleep quality and better sleep latency, which means that it would help you go to sleep quicker.

33:42And then also we would have dietary fiber in there to elongate. It's going to help with blood sugar regulation, also satiety management, but you'd want to have that at least two to three hours before bed. Then we can look at some specific supplementation. So it would matter on what you're utilizing currently for women that are perimenopausal. One of the number one things to help with, um, you know, sleep quality is progesterone. So we would look at a micronized bioidentical progesterone. So that can be one modality. If you want to go to the natural modality, we can look at just a natural stack of whether it be, um, minerals or even neurotransmitters.

34:10So we can look at something like magnesium that's going to help with a signaling GABA and calming you down. So something like a magnesium glycinate, which is bonded or bonded to glycine, which is a calming neurotransmitter. I really like glycine, especially for women with hot flashes and with night sweats, because it helps you decrease core body temperature. We can do the same thing by having a shower before bed, actually hot temperatures, conversely enough. If you have a hot shower before bed, it actually cools down your internal body temperature. So it helps with sleep. We could also look at something like an L-theanine, which helps with decreasing rumination It's a stress reduction agent These aren't things that are going to put you right out But they're going to help you get into more of a parasympathetic state of rest and digest Then we can look at, for some people, melatonin works very well I find that to be very conducive or beneficial Especially for people with high amounts of oxidative stress So I see someone that has like high CRP or high inflammatory markers I actually use melatonin because milligram per milligram gram.

35:03Molotonin is the, the highest or the best potency antioxidant that we have from nature. So there's like all these different modalities that we can utilize, but here's, here's the thing. We're going to incorporate one by one to see what works for you. I really like an isolated fashion. I like utilizing the scientific method. So it wouldn't be, Hey, I'm going to throw all these things, throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. It's going to be, Hey, Laura, this week, we're going to incorporate this before bed. I want you to take 200 milligrams of magnesium glycinate an hour before going to bed.

35:30And I want you to do that for the next week and report back to me, how you feel. Do you have any digestive discomfort? Do you have any, you know, are you feeling a little bit more rested and regulated? And we'll add things to the mix, but we'll take things in an isolated and more of a strategic fashion. I just took notes while you were talking. That is really good advice. If you need any references or anything else, I can send it to you after this. No, I look, your approach is smart. If we're in, if we're back to the fat loss phase And you talked about high flux because I think this is super interesting.

36:01And I want to say it was Andy Galpin maybe that was talking about it not recently, but maybe last six months recently. But by high flux, you're meaning you want to start someone on higher calories, but it's still in a deficit, but not a moderate deficit. it and you're adding on exercise on top of that to balance the energy out. Yeah. Let me explain the concept of energy flux for you, because this is actually something that I kind of brought to the fitness industry. If you look at my name and energy flux, you're going to see dozens and dozens of podcasts. I've done presentations all around the country.

36:38I've written for Alan Aragon's research review on this. So there's a lot of comprehensive information I've done on this. And I've really tried to push this forward because when I was initially in the fitness industry, especially working competition prep and things of that sort, I started noticing that there was a lot of hormonal and metabolic down regulations where people were having to eat very low calories and they were just in a state where they were in this chronic state of restriction and subtraction. And I really liked the idea of getting them into more of a model of abundance and addition.

37:05And I was looking at different pieces of literature and trying out different methods with my clients to try to see how I could offset these down regulations. So the first thing I started looking at was there was great research on what comprises most of metabolic adaptation. So metabolic adaptation is diet-induced. And what it means is when you go into a deficit, you see a downregulation in all four components of your total daily energy expenditure. And the number one most impactful area of metabolic adaptation is actually your knee. So your non-extra-lose activity thermogenesis. We see that knee or downregulations in knee account for 85 % to 90 % of the decreases in total calories burned per day during a deficit phase or during a fat loss phase.

37:43So I started looking at this and I said, well, how can I increase need? Need is usually subconscious activity, but the one thing that's included in there is steps. So at that point, about 2015, 2016 Fitbit is becoming more popular. I'm having clients track their steps. And I started noticing that there was a massive drop-offs from the beginning of a fat loss phase into like the middle of the fat loss phase. So I would have people that would be doing their normal 10 ,000 steps per day. And without me modifying it, they would still be doing their same cardio without me modifying it and specifically telling them to keep their steps up.

38:10They went from 10 ,000 to 7 ,000. I had some people at like three or 4 ,000 and it was a drastic reduction in their, their meat levels essentially, or their step count. So I started looking into this model and really 2018 was when the research on the concept of energy flux really got pushed forward by Chris Melby, who's actually a researcher out of Colorado. And so this is really what it came together as a model. But when I talk about energy flux, what I'm referring to is the state of calorie turnover in the body. And this is a relationship between how much energy you're taking in through food and how much you're expending through movement, exercise, and baseline functions like your resting metabolic rate and diet-induced thermogenesis.

38:46And now how I start people off is actually I like getting them into high flux when we're in a primer phase because we can maintain our body weight and body composition through either a low flux day or a high flux approach. So a low flux approach is where you have low energy intake coupled with low energy output. And this is the situation that most of like average sedentary dieters or women that have been downregulated and been through chronic dieting cycles are in. They have low energy expenditure, but they also have very low calorie intake. So most women over 40 are trying to maintain their weight on a very low calorie intake.

39:18And if you ask them, and I have many conversations with women in this position, one of the things they always tell me is that you feel like they're running on fumes. And so that's what we call low energy flux. And this is not sustainable. It often leads to poor recovery, increased fatigue, hormonal disruption, and a metabolism that's downregulated. So a high flux approach, how I like to simply put this is, this is where we eat more and we move more. And what I focus on with many of my female clients is helping them maintain their body weight while improving their body composition on more calories, not fewer.

39:46And how I do that is I increase their energy output strategically through movement. I'll utilize certain changes to resistance training and daily activity like steps, all while supporting their output with proper fueling. And the reason I do this is because it's more than just eating more calories and moving more. A lot of people see it as that, but if you actually look at the mechanisms behind it, it's hugely beneficial because you're going to increase your total daily energy expenditure in every capacity. So you're going to be burning more through increased meat and training. You're going to have more energy to invest into your activities of daily living.

40:16Instead of sitting on the couch and slumping down, you're going to be able to have more energy to go out and do things with your friends or your loved ones or your kids. You're going to be fueling for better hormone and thyroid health. So that's one thing I see with a lot of women that have a chronic dieting cycle or are in these massive deficits. They usually have hormonal issues with thyroid. So usually it's a low T3 and low T4. So especially from a T3 perspective, T3 is a metabolically active hormone for thyroid. And so that's going to have an implication on your resting metabolic rate and also your daily energy expenditure.

40:46It also plays roles in lipolysis, which is the breaking down of fat for energy. And so when you have low T3, you're going to be burning less calories. Your body's on conservation mode. And so by feeling yourself better, not only do you have more calories, but you also have more micronutrients. So there's a greater variety of micronutrients in the system. And so you're going to have better hormonal and thyroid health. You're also going to be building and preserving muscle, which is going to drive up your resting metabolic rate. And you're also creating more metabolic flexibility, which is that ability to switch between substrates.

41:12So you're going to be able to utilize carbohydrates during high intensity activity, like a resistance training, and then down-regulate and utilize fats during lower intensity activities, whether that's less cardio or that's just your day-to-day activities. And then the other massive thing about high energy flux, which is this is where the research is most impactful, is it's great for appetite management and satiety signaling. So we actually see that when people have low levels of activity, whether that is purposeful or just due to a down regulation from dieting hard, it actually dysregulates your appetite signaling.

41:42So you're actually hungrier than you would be on that same amount of intake. Now, when we get up to moderate to high levels of physical activity, we actually have better what's called energy coupling, which means we can more appropriately match our energy intake with our energy demands. So it's easier to stay at maintenance, which is something many people struggle with, especially if they had been in this low flux state, they've been chronically dying on very low calories. Anytime they try to get out of it and they try to go back to maintenance, they overshoot it and they suffer from body fat overshooting where they regain as much fat or more fat than the loss in the fat loss phase itself.

42:12Well, by getting into a high flux state, you're able to maintain your body weight on a higher amount of calories and you're putting yourself in a better position to succeed. So if I have someone in a primer phase and I take them through and I get them into higher energy flux, it gives me a larger budget to play with so I can pull more calories or I get to pull calories and not bring them down as low as they've been in the past. Because I have many women that come to me and it's like they've been eating a thousand, 1100 calories, 1200 calories. And it's just not sustainable because they're able to do that for a few days when they're white knuckling it.

42:39But once, you know, the motivation leaves or willpower, you know, you know, exits, they just don't have it in them to continue doing that. And they shouldn't. Do you, do you have any clients on GLP ones? I currently do not, but I'm pretty well versed in GLP ones. And I find it to be something that is going to be incredibly advantageous in the future. I will say that there are a lot of people in the fitness industry, especially from a coaching perspective, that are adamantly against GLP-1s. And I think that's just being negligent of the data. These are the biggest advancement in obesity management and treatment that we've ever had.

43:12And they're only going to get better from here. So I do think that I think of this as a life raft for a client. I will say that I have worked with a good amount of clients in the past that had been on GLP-1s. Now, this is not an intervention that I've implemented. This is something that they've come to me at or come to me on or come to me needing. However, I've been able to support them from a resistant training perspective, a nutrient perspective, a blood work perspective, making sure that they're not suffering from a lot of the consequences of GLP-1 use without guidance. Okay, so for low energy availability, because this is, I just recently talked to Mickey about this, But we see this, you know, you're right.

43:53A lot of women over 40 are coming in and they've been chronically dieting and they've, you know, not had regular cycles because of that. But they didn't know it was low energy availability, especially the endurance crowd. is there if you were to take somebody into a deficit like you've primed them and now they're in a deficit and it's it's modest you're paying attention to it where does because I I get this question a lot after maybe even a couple of days of being in a modest deficit and I I know what is the prescribed exercises so this isn't large amounts of um exercise on that day on that specific day or over a, let's say a three day period.

44:37Can you, and the question now comes up because everyone knows about it. I think I'm in low energy availability. I must be in, you know, I must be experiencing Red S. Well, you know, it's only been a couple of days. Are you doing a lot outside of this? But does that come on that fast? I know we can have influxes throughout the day. Um, but what's, what's your opinion? I guess. Oh, this is super interesting. So there is a recent consensus statement by the IOC that it was an update on relative energy deficiency in sport. Now, let me be very clear about relative energy efficiency. I think that for a lifestyle population, it's more appropriate to discuss a metabolic adaptation, which are the diet-induced down regulations and energy expenditure that are transient, not permanent.

45:21So we can discuss that a little bit later. I'll go through relative energy efficiency. Relative energy efficiency is a mismatching of energy intake and energy expenditure specifically through exercise. So how low energy availability is calculated is you take someone's lean body mass and you do it per kilogram of fat-free mass, essentially. You look at the difference between their total energy intake and their total exercise energy expenditure equated over their amount of lean mass. Now, here's the issue. There are calculations you can do, but they're imprecise because most people are not going to accurately track their calories.

45:54And even if they did, okay, we have one piece of the parameter or one piece of the pie. Secondarily, if we actually look at exercise energy expenditure devices, there's a meta-analysis, I believe it's from 2020, which looked at risk-worn devices and technology for looking at calories burned during exercise. And they were between 28 to 93 % off of accuracy. So we're looking at massive discrepancies where you really can't trust your Apple Watch, your Aura Ring, none of these things, your Fitbit. Which is a huge bummer. yeah they're just i have a full episode breaking down the research on this but they're highly inaccurate so you can use it as a as a guide to say all right well today i burned a thousand calories now that is not accurate you know first of all we would have to look at the net amount of a calorie burn from exercise which means you have to subtract your actual resting metabolic rate and what you would have burned in that one hour period in and of itself which most people don't do they just add it on top of the amount of calories in and of itself but secondarily say that you have a calculation, generally you burn 500 calories per day.

46:53And then one day you have, you go on a hike, you have an extra, you know, resistant training session, whatever it may be. And you burn a thousand that day. Just know that you most likely burn more because you had a higher output or you had higher activity levels, but that doesn't mean it's accurate. So looking at low energy availability, there was like, I was alluding to, there was a consensus statement on this, which looked at any differentiated low energy availability in the model of reds. And what they found was that there is short term or there's adaptable LEA. Adaptable LEA means that this could be for, and this was specifically in the context of athletes.

47:23So they looked at it from like a weight cut perspective or someone that needed to meet a body weight goal to compete, or it's a short term of being in an energy deficit and also in a period or a state of low energy availability to hit a goal, but it's not chronic and problematic. Now the opposite end of the spectrum is the problematic low energy availability. Now problematic low energy availability is chronic, which means it occurs over months and months. And that's where we see really the implications. If you ever look at relative energy efficiency, I suggest anyone that's interested in this, you look up relative energy efficiency on Google, you'll see a spoke and it's a wheel and you see all these different ramifications.

47:56So we see metabolic consequences. We see cardiovascular consequences really within that. We see low estradiol and low progesterone, but specifically from low estradiol, we see an increase in cardiovascular disease risk. And we also see high cholesterol levels because when you have low estradiol and also low thyroid, you're not clearing cholesterol as readily. So you'll see high triglycerides, high LDL, high cholesterol in total. From there, you'll also see bone health decrements. So this is where we can get it to osteopenia or osteoporosis. Now that is a chronic condition that takes much time, but oftentimes when someone has been in a state of LEA for years on end, that is where they get to.

48:32So generally, if someone's just dieting, they're just going into a moderate deficit, like what I would recommend would be a small deficit at most for women, they're not going to get themselves in a chronic state of LEA. Now they might bounce in between periods of LEA, maybe one day per week or two days per week when they have a high amount of output or they have additional activities, but they're not going to be living there chronically. So this is not something you need to worry about unless you are someone that is incredibly active. You're an athlete. You're someone that's a competitor. You're a triathlete.

48:59You're an endurance runner, someone that has very high levels of energy output. And then you're always, you're also under fueling yourself. You could be in a state where it's likely that you'll be an LEA. But if we're talking about the general population client, the lifestyle client, a woman in her 40s to her, say 40 to 55 that's just looking to lose fat generally they're not in elliot okay what's a deficit deload okay so that is a uh approach that i use you've been you must have been digging through my social media because you've been finding all all my stuff all my turns all right

49:32my version of a diet break or refeed but the reason i can refer to it as a deficit deload and i actually had a conversation with this years ago when bill campbell was first publishing his diet break study. This is actually a study that ended up being published under Madeline Seedler, but Bill Campbell is the, I think the head author on the study. And my philosophy was I used to utilize refeeds and diet breaks with clients. And with refeeds, people always had this connotation essentially that they need to overeat. And so that was a negative. And then with diet breaks, they kind of just went off the rails.

50:01So with deficit deloads, I started utilizing an approach with clients that I would take four to seven days of bringing them up back up to maintenance, generally through carbohydrates to refuel muscle glycogen, refuel energy stores, but I would also do it in a manner that was very strategic and controlled. So I always send clients an outline of the deficit deload in terms of food sources, in terms of the scheduling that I want them to do, in terms of what happens if you mess up and you overeat, how to get back on track. So I really try to make it that this is a physiological reprieve from the deficit.

50:31And the reason I refer to it as a deficit deload is everything I do is periodized, both in terms of training and nutrition. So many of my clients are already used to utilizing deloads as a way to decrease physiological fatigue that is accumulated over the course of a mesocycle. So when I utilize the term or the approach of a deficit deload, my clients kind of just come to and they're like, okay, so this is just a break. We're trying to dissipate diet fatigue. They don't see it as this is like this all or nothing black or white mentality where we just veer off the beaten path and we eat whatever we want, because that would be counterproductive to the actual goals of the fat loss phase.

51:03I want to bring you back up to maintenance. I want to reverse some of the adaptations. I want to get more energy in the system, but I want to do so in a manner that's conducive for your performance, for your physiology, and then also for your psychology. I don't want you bouncing between periods of being in a massive deficit to overeating and bingeing. Okay. So I like how you, I like the terminology that you use around that. I do too. It's helpful. I think words matter. Yeah. Okay. So it sounds like if we reverse back a little bit, when you talk about, you said that, and I agree personally, but I know there's a lot of chatter in the fitness field right now about the fasted versus fed training.

51:47Like if we're talking about, you know, not an endurance athlete, but if we're just looking at an hour of really hard, ideally, pretty taxing, whatever that looks like, resistance training session. I can't imagine myself going into and busting out a, you know, 275 pound deadlift for X amount of reps with zero food. especially because I wait, you know, I don't eat two to three hours before bed. So what are your thoughts on that? And I know we kind of talked about it, but anything else to add in this conversation of the fasted versus fed? Is it a deal breaker either way? Absolutely. And so I will say from a coaching perspective and a practical perspective, I don't think anything is ever a deal breaker because that would mean that I wouldn't be able to meet my clients where they're at.

52:41And that's the number one component of coaching. First, it's do no harm. And second is meet your client where they're at and inch your way to getting into a happy compromise between the two. But I will say, especially with women, I had many women that come to me where they've been resisting training in a facet state and they haven't realized maybe some of the consequences of the drawbacks of that until I start having them integrate slowly, but surely integrate more nutrient timing philosophy where I'm really surrounding the peri-workout window, which means the window both pre, during, and post with some nutrients.

53:10So the first thing I'll generally include is something just like a whey protein shake. So they're not going to need to get hydrated. So I'll put whey protein and I'll put a serving of salt just so they have some type of hydration. We'll start with that. That is going to give them sufficient amino acid availability, which will break the fast and get them from that catabolic state of being in the morning and fasted into more of an anabolic state because you're signaling muscle protein synthesis. So that's the first step. Secondarily, then I'll start adding small amounts. Maybe it's some fruit or it's some rice cake, something that's easily digested.

53:37because a lot of women say, Hey, I don't want to eat a lot. I don't want to feel heavy in the gym. No worries. We can do a liquid meal. We can do something very small, like an apple and a protein shake, whatever it may be. We can do a Greek yogurt and a piece of fruit. It doesn't have to be like these large gluttonous meals where you feel like bogged down, but I want some fuel in the system. And I can't tell you how many times, dozens and dozens of times that women have come back to me weeks into the process. Now, mind you, sometimes they fight it in the beginning, but you know, we get a couple of weeks into it and they say, my performance is going up.

54:04I feel better energy wise. I have better mental clarity. I feel more recovered, especially because I'm not only doing it pre-workout, but I'm also having them sufficiently fueled post-workout with a quality protein source, high glycemic carbs to be able to restore and restock muscle glycogen. Now, the other thing is that if we actually look on the research, and this is why I specifically start with protein, but then I go to carbohydrates second, is that if we look at a meta-analysis by King and colleagues, actually Eric Helms, who we were discussing off air Haley is an author on this paper, he looked at the influence of carbohydrates on resistant training outcomes in terms of muscle gain and also performance.

54:39Now, if you actually look into the entire meta-analysis, this isn't just looking at the abstract. If you go through the entire meta-analysis, we look at confounding factors or contributing factors, modifying factors, where it made pre-workout nutrition, specifically pre-workout carbohydrates, more beneficial to resistant training outcomes. The number one was after an overnight fast. So if you had went eight or more hours without food, you had a bigger benefit to your performance and your muscle gain outcome from including carbohydrates into your pre-workout meal. Now, the thing here was the carbohydrates, it didn't have to be a bolus dose.

55:11So I believe that their recommendations were at least 15 to 20 grams. So we're not talking this huge carb load before your workout. It's enough just to get your blood glucose stabilized. It's enough to get some glucose into the system. And actually one of the other theories behind this, and we actually have studies that look at breakfast skipping versus pre-workout on resistant training outcomes. It's just the fact of having something that's somewhat satiating because hunger is a mechanism that actually decreases your performance outcomes. There's like a central governor theory, which if you don't have nutrients in your system, you may not be able to push as hard.

55:42There's many different competing theories. There's also like mouth rinsing studies, which show that just the act of mouth rinsing carbohydrates increased performance. So if we look at the actual literature of a few things that came out in that meta-analysis, A, after an eight hour overnight fast, it was more beneficial to have carbohydrates. And also if you were doing one of the two following things, multiple muscle groups in a session. So a lot of times I have women doing upper and lower splits. So they'll be utilizing multiple muscle groups, higher volumes. The other component of that meta-analysis was if a workout was 45 minutes or over, and most people I have are training an hour in the gym.

56:14And the other thing was if you were using larger musculature. So if you were training legs, you're just doing legs. That was another modifying factor that led to pre-workout carbohydrates being more beneficial on training performance. So when I look at what I have the women that I work with doing, they're training for say 45 to 60 minutes. They are after an eight hour overnight fast. And they're also in a position where they're going to be pushing themselves very hard in a resistance training context. These are all, you know, specific contexts where it would be beneficial for them to have some type of nutrients pre-workout.

56:44So that's where I'll combine, you know, some, some protein, easily digestible protein and carbohydrates pre-workout. And that will lead to better outcomes over time. Now, am I saying on an acute basis, when we look at just one study in isolation that is only one day looking at Fed versus fasted training, that there's going to be massive decrements? No. But I really have to think about the time course over a phase and over multiple phases that I'm taking a client through. The average client that I work with stays with me for over a year. So I'm trying to stack up every single 1 % or every penny that I can because that is going to be a deposit into their progress bank that compounds and adds up over time.

57:17Okay. We're almost out of time and I'm super bummed. But if we were to talk about bringing someone out a reverse diet, how do you step load that? What would that look like for a middle-aged female? Any different or just for a female in general? How do you reverse diet out? So I don't really use the terminology reverse dieting just because there's been a lot of contention as to whether that is the best approach, to be honest with you. Um, and really what that comes down to is a lot of times with reverse dining, people are pretty much taking and like what we call them like coaching, like 10 carving or five gram fatting people, meaning that they're increasing so little that the person is actively staying in deficit and they have, they're still in a metabolically adapted state.

58:04So what I do is I take coaching data that I've collected over the course of a phase, specifically the last four weeks that I work with someone. And I'm looking at, based on their rate of loss, as well as their biofeedback, what is their calculated energy deficit in their active weight loss phase of those last four weeks? Then I'm reverse engineering that and calculating that. That should be, if I was to back calculate that and say, for instance, I'm going to give a really easy example. If they were losing a pound per week at the end of those last four weeks, we know that they're approximately in a 3 ,500 calorie deficit.

58:32That means a 500 calorie deficit per day. Now, most people will go up just 500 calories, you know, or I could take that philosophy. Generally, I'll increase by 85 to 90%. And the reason for that is we generally see that adaptive decrease. Like I was referring to when someone loses 10 % of body weight, it's generally between 15 to 25 % that they're decreasing their total daily energy expenditure. So I want to make sure I don't overshoot right off the bat. And then from there, it is a process of looking at biofeedback, looking at weight trends, looking at their performance indices, also looking at what their clothes, like how their clothes fit, what their visual photos look like, that we're able to be able to really customize it towards the individual.

59:10There's also the consideration that we have to realize that there are two different approaches to the post diet phase. If I have a general lifestyle client that's lost a decent amount of weight, but she's lifestyle lean, she isn't shredded. That's going to be a different approach where I'm going to really just try to refine her new maintenance. Like I had referred to previously, the maintenance after your fat loss phase is not same as it was previously especially say that you've lost 15 to 20 pounds a lighter body burns less calories both at rest and through activities so we can't go back right to where you were maintenance wise we will work that up over time however if you're someone that you have gotten you're an athlete or you're a competitor or you're just someone that you know has gotten into photoshoot shape and you've gotten to unsustainable levels of leanness we need to actually increase your calories even more right off the bat because we have to get some fat back on your system to regulate your hormones your appetite signaling and just your your physiological status.

59:58And that is something that's very hard for people to understand. But if you are in a state where you're at very low levels of body fat, I've had women at 14, 15 % body fat, which is way under, you know, where most people are going to be. And we're talking 15 on a DEXA. So that would be what people colloquially would say would be like 10 % body fat. We're talking shredded women. You cannot expect to stay there because you're not going to be able to, first of all, you're in a state where you're metabolically down-regulated. You're going to have issues from a hormonal, especially if you're natural, from a hormonal perspective, you don't want to stay in that low low estrogen, low progesterone state, not only is that rough to your biofeedback, but also to your bone health, your cognition, to your cardiovascular health, all these different things.

1:00:34They have downstream ramifications. And a lot of times people are only thinking about the here and now, like, Hey, I look great, but we really have to think about the long-term. That's something that I really tried to empower my clients through education and let them know, Hey, these are the upsides, but also the downsides of doing this. You want to get in the shape of your life. You want me to get you into photo shoot shape by all means, but this is the non-negotiable after we have to do what's called a recovery diet, which means that your rate of gain post diet is going be quicker than it would be in a metabolic restoration phase or a normal post diet phase where you had just gotten lifestyle lean.

1:01:02Brandon, I'm going to go listen to every podcast episode that you did and catch up on all of this and whoever you've been a guest on, because I love your approach. Number one, I knew I was going to like you because Mickey's like, Haley, he's so smart and he has no ego. And I'm like, the ego's in the field. So thank you for being super kind. you explained everything so well and you just have a nice approach and a nice take on it. So where can, well, first of all, let's find out what your podcast is and where women can find you. Absolutely. So if you guys would like an evidence-based podcast, this is just like a solo podcast.

1:01:43Generally, I'm just doing it by myself, but I've covered every single question that you've asked, which coincidentally, many of these things we hadn't discussed earlier that we were going to discuss, but I have an episode on everything we just discussed. So primer phases, I just put one out health centric coaching, all these different things. If you're interested, you can look up the chasing clarity, health and fitness podcast on Spotify or iTunes. Other best place to find me would be on Instagram. I put out daily content, which is at Brandon to cruise underscore. And then for my email, I'm always open to answer questions or help with people.

1:02:09If you need individualized coaching, that is beta cruise fitness at gmail.com. I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking your time and sharing with us today. I am very enlightened and thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. It was an absolute honor. And I truly appreciate you guys having me. And I know we only got through probably like three or four of the questions on the list. If you guys ever want to go through the rest, by all means, I'm always open to share my information and really connect with like-minded individuals. These always make my day. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a five-star rating and sharing the BodyPod with your friends.