Adjustment Opacity Problems | Lecture #93 transcript

Hey folks, Dr. Mike here for Renaissance Periodization, calorie balance video number seven, the last in the series, adjustment opacity problems. Whoa, what is opacity? I don't know. It's a cool word I found in a thesaurus. I sure hope it means something. JK, it is a derivative of the word opaque, which means in unable to see through. Not everything is always very clear. Why? In what context? All of the previous videos in this entire section of calorie balance have assumed that you can reliably use the scale to infer tissue size changes.

So, we're saying, you know, you lost two pounds, we're assuming that's like two pounds of mostly fat, some muscle. You gain two pounds, it's, you know, some combination of muscle and fat. But this is not always the case. Sometimes the scale can tell us a lot, sometimes it tells us not much, sometimes it tells us the opposite of what's really going on. And I see about three common issues, and you will, too, as you coach, and you may have already as you're already a coach, and it's good to kind of know what these issues are, what to expect, what to do as a coach in this regard.

So, first is uh salt and water dynamics, body water, which is highly mediated by salt in many cases. For example, your client has some Chinese food, and it's within the macros, and it's lots of MSG, lots of salt. You know, like after you get home from Chinese, you're like, "Oh my god, I need like three Diet Cokes." Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then you don't pee for the rest of the night. You wake up, all the salt trapped the water, that's what it does, and the client's up by five pounds the next day.

Well, in order for that to be five pounds of fat tissue, they would have had to have an excess above their normal intake of 17,500 calories of Chinese food. That means that that would have had to have been a 20,000 calorie day in total, roughly. That probably did not occur. They didn't just run at the Chinese buffet, open up their mouth this wide, and just like dip in just slide and everything that goes in goes in. So in this case, you just communicate with the client and say, "Look, we're going to ignore this weight cuz it's nonsense data.

And um we're going to wait for a few days. Your body water's going to readjust and then we're going to see the bigger trend and we're going to be like, "Oh, like probably nothing happened. No need to adjust anything." Big super important thing. If your clients weigh in on a certain Let's say they weigh in on you Monday, Wednesday, Friday and they send their Friday weight and it's way up. The first thing you should probably ask is like, "How was your eating?" Blah blah blah.

And they're like, "Yeah, like I definitely had like uh like a super high salt meal like you know, my husband brought like smoked salmon home. We had a bunch of it." And it's like, "Totally I actually underate my macros, but like I did drink like a gallon of of sugar-free lemonade after cuz smoked salmon has a ton of salt." Problem solved. This problem of salt and body water dynamics occurs in a few other ways. Ladies, time of the month.

Time of the month, your body weight's going to go nuts. When I have female clients with that time of the month, I just don't really care about their weight. All I care is that they're eating their diet like they're supposed to be and they're psychologically in a place of like relative calm. That's it. The weight will sort itself out when the time of the month, you know, comes and goes and after that we're like, "Oh, look, we're on track." Or we need to make an adjustment.

No big deal. When you have female clients either as a female yourself or as a male or however you identify, uh you have to understand that a lot of females sometimes intuitively, implicitly know that they shouldn't be worried, but they get worried anyway. So we have the time of the month, I'm gaining weight. What do you think I should do? And we're like, "Well, this It's just a period. It just happens. You're not gaining extra fat or something like that.

It's not news to you, but it could be news to them." Um now, I will say sometimes during that time of the month, some some ladies will compensate for strange hormonal feelings by eating like five slices of chocolate cake. Uh you should ask them how was your eating? They're like, "It's totally the same. It's totally good." Then you're like, "Totally good." But if they're like, "Well, yeah, you know, like it's time of the month, so I decided to rob a candy store and actually not take any money.

Just took candy." Like, "Ah, I see. Yes, then we'll make the adjustment. We'll find out how much candy you ate again in a week when your weight stabilizes." The same occurs when you're switching from a fat loss phase to a a gaining phase. Crazy body water or fat loss phase to a maintenance phase. Advice on all these is use just wait until the weight stabilizes, usually about a week, and then act alter the calories and macros for the plan as needed.

So, the weight spikes, just generally there's nothing to do about it except be like, "Ah, stuff happens. We'll see in a bit if how much of that sticks around." Issue number two. Uh sorry, uh last thing really quick. So, um Okay, this is kind of between [clears throat] issue one and two. I'll just I'll just lump it into issue two. Issue number two is a bit different. As a coach, you are raising the client's calories and their weight just isn't moving up.

Or you're lowering their calories and their weight is just not moving down. What the hell's going on? This would be baffling for the coach cuz you're like, uh uh diets don't work. Unbelievable. Very baffling for the client cuz you're like, "What am I doing wrong?" Like, "Nothing, I don't think." First thing you do is just raise or lower it a few more times. Sometimes you lower the weight you lower the calories 2 weeks in a row, not much happens, you lower it week three and they lose like 8 lb.

So, it's tons of body water stuff. Or they were just like they were on a slight surplus even though you didn't know it, and you make a couple more adjustments and then it's now the deficit that you want. Another thing is to feedback into point one, this is the confusion earlier, talk to the client about their salt and water intake. At the tail end of the diet both can increase, and it happens in an interesting loop, and I'll explain the loop to you.

As a client becomes very hungry towards the end of a fat loss phase, they're going to be drawn towards two types of things. Well, three. One is just more food and cheat food, which they can't have and if they're compliant, they don't. But the other two things are foods with high salt, which tend to you get craving for when you're hungry, and um artificial sweeteners, which fool your body into who your brain into thinking like I'm getting sugar.

This is saving my life. Thank you, evolution. So, a lot of this can happen in a really interesting loop where they do the following. They will salt their food more, use more seasonings, or eat a bunch of pickles, or something like that. Smoke salmon versus regular salmon, etc. That increase in salt causes an increase in how much fluid they want to consume, naturally, and it's supposed to. And if it was just plain water, they would have the salt, water, water washes out the salt, a few days later everything's good to go.

Instead of doing that, they have uh artificially sweetened beverages, which are totally healthy, totally safe, no big deal. They have a couple uh diet Sprites. A diet Sprite, the sugar is the sweetness sugar, the sweetness taste, the artificial sweeteners taste so good. You're starving, remember, end of the fat loss phase, that the client ends up having like three or four of them. And then so they raise their salt and they raise their water.

The next day, they do the same thing. Tons of salt in the food, tons of fluids, even more fluids because the salt makes them really desiring to have fluid just on pure physiological grounds, and then because the fluid is really fun to drink and there's it's calorie free, you're like, "Fuck it, I'm going to have 10, you know, diet diet Sprites or something like that." Go up like that. Go up like that. This typically scales into the end of the diet.

So, the last four or six weeks, they'll have a little bit more salt every every few days, a little bit more sugar-free beverages. And thus their salt intake and their water intake continue to scale up like this. And some clients, many clients will just just start to store all that because your salt and water balance are even, your body doesn't pee it out. If it's too much salt, your body wants more more more fluids, and then once you get get fluids, you don't have a fluid drive anymore, you pee out the salt, pee out all the water, and it goes back.

But, if you continue to drink lots of fluids because they're super tasty and you're drinking way more fluids than you ever would normally, it holds the body water on for a lot longer. And it's only going to hold it on for maybe a week, and then you start to re-norm and everything goes back. But, if you're inching up in salt and fluids for several weeks, and there's a several and there's a 1-week hold time for anything you maintain, you end up doing this thing where you just stay roughly the same body weight even though the client is losing tissue this whole time, the scale is just saying nothing.

You can even gain a little bit of weight, which is a real huge mind [ __ ] So, first, talk to the or second, after waiting a little while and making some more adjustments, talk to the client about salt intake and water intake, especially the the sweetened beverages. And if they're like, "Yeah, I've really for sure now like tell me about it. I've been smashing the sugar-free lemonade, and yes, I have like a pickle an hour." Then you're like, "Well, that's what's happening." And here's the thing, you can say to them, "Look, we know you're in a deficit cuz we've had you in a deficit before and we've made it even more extreme.

You're still upright, you're not crazy diet fatigued. You can just keep having these things, and then after you transition to your muscle gain phase, and you go back to normal eating, your weight is you're going to begin a muscle gain phase for 3 weeks, and you're going to gain no weight, gain no weight, gain no weight, and then start gaining weight. So, you basically front-loaded the bloating that would happen after anyway.

Fine, but if you want to dry out and see what you really look like, it's time to lower the salt and lower the water. Another thing is a big one is neat, non-exercise activity thermogenesis. You want to get a handle on that, on that physical activity. Because as folks, if you drop their calories, and they're not they don't have like a step tracker to peg their neat at a certain amount every day, they're going to subconsciously a lot of times just do less activity.

And thus, you're dropping their calories, but they're dropping their expenditure, and then the weight isn't really moving much of anywhere. That is a real problem that has to get solved. So, it's a problem you shouldn't have because coaching the RP way, you should understand what their intake is, their weight training is, and what their NEAT is, and peg the NEAT usually with a step tracker like a 10,000 steps a day or 12,000 or whatever it is.

And as long as they're hitting that, they're good. But if you've never broached the subject of NEAT, you have to broach it cuz this is a big deal that can happen. And another option here is to gently discuss off-plan eating. Uh tell them it's okay either way like hey, it's totally fine to eat some stuff off the plan. It's not like a moral failing or anything. Have you been doing anything of that nature so on and so forth?

And the thing is sometimes they'll just straight-up tell you like yeah, that's for sure happening and I'm going to put a stop to it or like for sure happening and I don't want to put a stop to it. I'm really in a bad place like I'm starving. And you're like hey, like let's just end the fat loss phase, heal the diet fatigue, and we'll take another shot at this much later if you want. And they're like [ __ ] it, sweet, amazing.

Or they're like nah, nah, nah, I got this. I'm I'm going to clean it up and they do and everything's great. But sometimes people will lie to you. And it's usually not like a nefarious kind of lying cuz what's the upside? They're just paying you money to lie to you? They just don't want to admit that they had what they recognize as a moral failing. It's not a moral failing, for the love of God. We live in a hyper-advanced civilization.

Everyone's super productive. It's just It's just all for show anyway. It's just to have abs, who cares? But people typically don't like to be seen as folks who fail at stuff or folks who can't continue through a plan. So, they sometimes lie by omission or lie explicitly and you can sometimes ask or suggest uh that maybe they're eating off plan five times before they finally admit it. Sometimes they never admit it and you just kind of have to throw them into maintenance if that's the case.

And maybe they'll admit it months later or never admit it, but now the diet's all the work well cuz you know once a certain diet fatigue hits, they start cheating. You know when that plan is. So, eight weeks, that's all I get out of this client. After eight weeks, I don't care how good they say they feel, they go into maintenance. And that's totally cool. But sometimes they can admit it kind of step by step. I've had this happen a whole bunch.

It's funny to see in real life, but you know, I'm going to make a mockery of this. This is going to be a a caricature to get some laughs out of you guys, but it you know, something like, you know, you say like, "Hey, like did you know, you've been eating off plan?" And then so first they say no. And then you approach that conversation a few days later and they're like, "I did I did have a bit of a Snickers, yes, you know, it's that that's that's the thing." Uh and and you say, "Okay, like a bite?" And they're like, "Yeah, my husband had a Snickers, like a bite, a little tiny bite." And I'm like, "Okay, cool, cool." Talk about it a little more and they're like, "I I I did have a fun-size Snickers." And I'm like, "Okay, cool." Talk about it a bit more and they're like, "I I I ate a king-size Snickers bar by myself, alone." And I'm like, "Whoa, okay." And and then and then it gets crazier.

And they're like, "I I absolutely unapologetically mugged a few children on Halloween and took their candy and ate it." And I'm like, "Oh my god." And then they're like, "Look, I um I have a room in my house that has nothing but candy wrappers and child corpses in it." And I'm like, "Oh. Oh, I I have to call the police." And they're like, "Please do. I need help and those poor children's souls. Please pray for them." Right?

Hopefully it doesn't get that crazy. But people will do this. They'll say, "I I My friends went out and we ate a little bit of pizza." And I'm like, "Okay, cool. No worries. No worries. We'll we'll re-recheck the diet." You talk about it a little later in some other context it comes up and they're like, "Yeah, I I had a I had a I had a slice or two. I had a slice or two." And I'm like, "Okay, no big deal." And they're like, "Yeah, like uh I ate a whole pizza by myself and my friends were like, 'Whoa, are you okay?' And I was like, 'Shut up.'" So, sometimes people just don't want to spill out the truth to you and you don't have to pry.

As soon as you know, there was some off-plan eating, that's all you need to know. Because as the programmer, as the architect of the diet, you just need to know, okay, the compliance isn't dependable, and so I just need to continue to encourage them to stay on plan and wait and see what happens next. That's it. It's not like you're going to find out something crazy about like, "Oh, they had just a slice." And it alters the laws of thermodynamics versus if they had a pizza.

As long as you know they were off plan, this is just a giant question mark as to what the hell happened. Just leave it as a question mark, move on. Few days later, few weeks later, make the changes you need, have another conversation, whatever. Lastly, an issue you probably won't run into a ton, but just because if you do, you want to be prepared, special sports supplements, aka performance enhancing drugs, steroids, etc.

They have such huge effects on body water that they make weigh-ins almost meaningless. Uh especially when you introduce uh compounds in higher and higher dosages over the week, which is how most people take it, or they'll have a compound here running for a few months and then they'll add another compound to it. Um that generally causes a body water bump every time. The way that fat loss phases occur in enhanced prep for bodybuilding is you actually take more and more compounds as the diet uh continues on to have an anti-catabolic effect to spare all the muscle, and then also, while it it does an excellent job at sparing all the muscle and even building some new muscle, it has the kind of downside of the the weight is a weight just completely gone as a measurement that you can reliably use to infer calories, period.

So, how do you how do you coach people like this? Well, if their weight is doing wacky stuff and they're in a muscle gain phase, you basically are like, okay, you still look lean and you're not stuffed to the brim with food, we keep gaining. If they're getting a little pudgy and they're really having a hard time eating, it's mini cut time. We don't care what the weight is doing. Those signs and signals are enough. On the other hand, on a fat loss phase, you know, if they're really feeling empty and low on energy, good, it's a fat loss phase.

You're supposed to feel like that, keep going. If you feel ultra super flat and super fatigued and a little weaker, it's time for a refill, drop the diet fatigue, and then get back into the plan and get back in into the hypocaloric stuff. Eventually, when you pull all the water, do all the manipulations, and get ready for the stage, yeah, their body weight will have shifted a lot and usually down. But, sometimes it just stays roughly the same.

And you just basically, for those folks, you go on feeling, hunger versus not hunger, fullness of the muscles, strength in the gym, and appearance. And if everything is going on track, you just execute. And if it's off track, you make the adjustment. You don't need body weight. If we had a magic ability to make body weight completely elucidated in enhanced prep with special sport supplements, oh my god, it would be amazing.

But, we don't, so we have to do the next best thing. So, for your not enhanced clients, almost all of them that are drug-free or not taking steroids and stuff like that, then yes, absolutely, weight is critical to use. But, in these other examples, the other two examples, it can get wacky. Do your best. Always stay patient. Never judge judge your clients morally. Never rush to conclusions. You're calm. You're patient.

Their weight isn't moving. Execute the plan as instructed. And then over time, all these problems get solved. And it's almost always salt and body water is what's going on. All right, folks. Thanks so much for tuning in. See you guys next time for the next course. Peace.