Why We Get Slow Metabolisms & Should You Reverse Diet? Science Discussion ft. Dr. Eric Trexler

okay what is going on everyone uh so in this video i'm gonna be speaking with dr eric trexler and we're talking mostly about why it is that our metabolisms slow down as we lose body weight and how we can prevent that metabolic slowdown from happening and then we also talk about what to do once the diet is over so we can improve our recovery and prevent excessive fat gain as we look at the question of whether you should reverse diet or just immediately increase calories and enter a bulk right away after the diet is over we also talk about so-called starvation mode and metabolic damage comes the idea that if you dieted before and really suppressed your metabolism then your metabolism can become somehow damaged and so then that can prevent you from losing weight down the road so we talk about whether that's a legitimate concept or not uh we also talk about rapid weight loss or crash dieting and a bunch of other surrounding topics as well and i think that as you guys will see eric is a really smart guy he's published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals he's also a pro natural bodybuilder himself and a strength coach so he has a ton of experience not only in the lab but also in the gym himself and in working with clients so i think that this is a conversation you guys are really going to enjoy and benefit from and also for the record this is going to be available on my podcast so if you just search for the jeff nippert podcast on itunes or stitcher and then you can find it over there and i will have timestamps both in the description box and in the comments below so if you want to jump to whatever topic that sounds most interesting to you then feel free to hop around uh so without further ado i hope you guys really enjoy this conversation with dr eric trexler all right so guys i'm here with eric trexler eric thanks for being here man yeah thanks for having me on before we we hopped on the call here i was actually looking at your research gate i was trying to dig up that paper you wrote i think was 2013 on metabolic adaptation with with lane norton um and i was scrolling down trying to find it and i was like holy crap this guy's been super busy the last few years he published a lot of stuff yeah yeah it's been very busy but um but yeah i mean you probably saw in the titles uh a lot of the papers are stuff that i'm just really interested in you know like doing stuff with bodybuilders doing stuff with fat free mass index a lot of really popular supplements so it's easier to be busy when the topics are are relevant and really mean something to you you know when was it that that paper came out um i never did end up getting all the way down to it uh so that came out in 2014 okay it's actually the first paper that i wrote as a grad student yeah i really remember it because at i think i remember if not the day it came out like the week it came out because it was so hot at that time in the community so controversial because everyone was arguing then about metabolic damage and metabolic slowdown and all this stuff and that was kind of like the paper that sort of addressed it and clarified things from a scientific perspective so you say yeah i mean it's funny that you say that because i just wrote a big article i don't know when it'll come out on uh stronger by science.com but i kind of mentioned that like there was a minute there where this stuff seemed controversial but it just really isn't you know what i mean um and so in the article i basically say i refuse to acknowledge that this is controversial in any in any way because it's just not there's a lot of science there and i thought because it was such a heated kind of conversation at the time when it got published and it was open access so anybody could get to it i was like some people are gonna be you know really annoyed with it um but if you kind of take a very objective look at it there's really not a lot of controversy there and so there was not no one kind of messaged me and said you're an idiot or anything like that which is always good that was deflected onto other people on other message boards probably yes yeah well and it was deflected to people that were either not being careful with the claims they made or weren't being really nuanced with how they framed it um so you'd start getting very sensational kind of interpretations of it and that's where it starts to get controversial right right i find it interesting because now here like five years later you're pretty much the guy to go to on all these issues with metabolism and metabolic slowdown and and all this stuff and i guess it all started with that paper yeah yeah i mean i i wouldn't i wouldn't claim to be the guy i'm one of the guys there's i mean i'm pretty sure lyle mcdonald's been writing about this since i was in high school yeah um you know lane knows a ton about it eric helm so i'm one of the guys but it it's certainly a topic that whenever people bring me on a podcast it comes up a lot yeah i've seen you on a few of them so just to get everybody up to speed here we're going to be talking about mostly weight loss and basically what happens to your metabolism and your body more generally as you lose weight and how to prevent bad stuff from happening so you can continue to lose weight and then after that i'd like to focus on what to do after the diet is over so as to like either maintain that level of leanness or not have this suppressed metabolism you know at least to the best of your ability so um before we do that let's get everyone up to speed on the metabolic adaptation paper and we can kind of use that as the framework to then move forward in terms of how the the literature has progressed from there and then move into practical applications so maybe you can just lay out the components of metabolism so everyone's on the same page with that and then how is it that metabolism changes as you start to lose weight yeah so um components of metabolism let me knock that out first when we look at metabolic rate we're looking at a combination of things it's resting metabolic rate uh the thermic effect of feeding uh we're looking at exercise activity thermogenesis calories we burn exercising and then non-exercise activity thermogenesis which is often called meat um so those are the component components of metabolic rate now when we lose weight um we will expect that our total energy expenditure the sum of those components will go down and there's you know body mass is metabolically active so if we have less body mass especially lean mass we would expect a lower rate of metabolism but what we see in the literature pretty consistently and this is why i say it's really not controversial is when people lose a substantial amount of body body mass their total energy expenditure drops more than we would expect it to um and and that's accompanied by changes uh that we talk about in that review paper that go all the way from the brain down to the mitochondria so i mean huge control centers of the brain that are tremendously influential in everything we do all the way down to you know microscopic components of our cells so basically you start losing body mass you start to see some hormone changes as a result um anyone that's been through a pretty rigorous diet kind of has felt these um these are hormones that control our energy expenditure certainly but they also control our uh you know hunger our ability to build muscle uh reproductive side effects when you start to get really lean so we see this whole milieu of hormonal changes and ultimately drops in metabolic rate and those drops in metabolic rate [Music] you know the thermic effect of feeding goes down because you're eating less food that's kind of what you signed up for when you diet we see changes in muscle efficiency that could affect exercise activity thermogenesis we see small changes in resting metabolic rate for sure some of those are due to adaptation some are due to just being in a deficit at that time and then certainly non-exercise activity really takes a huge hit so when you look at the truly adaptive component of metabolic adaptation that's where non-exercise activity thermogenesis really is uh the primary one that we focus on so to put it in kind of a nutshell we expect metabolic rate to go down as we lose weight but there appears to be an adaptation that takes place that makes us more efficient at burning calories and intuitively it seems like it's essentially a response to prevent starvation you know there's an evolutionary basis by which we would want to be more efficient with energy when we start to uh either have acutely low energy availability and you know as far as our body knows it means we can't find food and we're kind of screwed and then certainly when our body fat stores get low that means we've been unable to find food for quite a while and that is a very direct threat to our survival as an organism right right um a couple of things there i'm just going to recap real quickly one thing that came to mind is people are often under this assumption that smaller people have have faster metabolisms and and bigger chubbier people don't but i would say all else equal a bigger body is going to mean more energy expenditure in general right so as you lose mass and as you lose weight your metabolism is going to get slower just simply as a function that you have less energy expending mass available absolutely yeah i mean in my lab over the last six years i've measured resting metabolic rate a billion times and the one thing that can help me guess about where it's going to be is just your body size and resting metabolic rate really there's not a huge window of fluctuation it pretty much is mostly determined by your body size so when someone uh you know we did a study with uh uh people undergoing bariatric surgery weight loss surgery who were very large and uh their resting metabolic rates were quite high you know what i mean and then so yeah the idea that like you know people who are bigger or have more body fat that it's because their resting metabolic rate is low uh there's really not a lot of evidence to support that right right so when you diet you have this first thing which is just that you're getting smaller so you have a slower metabolism simply as a function of that but then you also have this adaptive component so it actually slows down more than you'd expect just on the weight loss alone right and you're saying you're saying that most of this slow down is probably attributable to neat which i've talked about here before but it's basically anything that burns calories that's not formal exercise right it's activity but it's not actual exercise yeah without question neat is it's not the only thing that adapts but it's it's the biggest overall influential factor right right um so so that should be a pretty good recap you said you also have uh exercise activity activity thermogenesis takes a bit of a heat or a bit of a hit because your body becomes more efficient while exercising doesn't burn the same number of calories and then obviously the thermic effect of food even though that's kind of a small slice still takes a hit because you have less food coming in so you're going to burn less calories digesting that food yeah and i think that pretty much accounts for all the factors that contribute to slow down i would say pretty closely yeah i mean there's a little bit of a reduction in resting metabolic rate right right um but a lot of that basically disappears once you're at weight maintenance or once you're at you're you know no longer in a calorie deficit we see that that basal or resting metabolic rate component picks up pretty quick right so so how long does it take for these we'll call them negative adaptations to happen does it happen you know one week into a diet or 12 weeks in or is there any way to predict when you're going to start to see this slow down um so they have there's a lot of different changes that occur and they all change they all occur over different time courses so um you know some of these things you know you'll start to see acute hormone changes within hours of going into a calorie deficit you know um when you look at leptin that's the hormone that is without a doubt the most influential hormone when it comes to metabolic adaptation leptin tends to fall off really precipitously within the first four or five days and then it kind of starts to flatten out it still continues to drop but there's two very clear phases there's like the first week or so where leptin completely drops off and then it starts to drop at a much more linear kind of slope other things kind of increase as the duration of the diet goes on especially as you get leaner and leaner and leaner and so you know things like as as a male reproductive side effects you know kind of that low testosterone that's very common to see you can get away with with dieting for a while before that starts to really really hit you um at least in my experience and you know looking at research as well but that's one of those ones that over time the leaner you get the more the weight loss is going forward the longer you've been in the deficit that's where you start to see testosterone really start to drop off so some of these things take hours some take days some take months right in my coaching experience it seems to be it almost seems to be an individual just based on the anecdotes i've seen it's like some people i can put them in a pretty you know reasonable deficit like 20 or whatever and they lose weight fine on that up until a certain point like if they're a guy maybe when they hit seven or eight percent body fat then it just like all of a sudden it's like things really start to slow down whereas with some people it almost seems like right away as soon as they start the diet it's like you immediately have to start increasing or lowering the calories almost right away because their metabolism seems to adapt very quickly is that something you've you've noticed yourself is there any literature to support like individual differences in metabolic adaptation um there's a great deal of research looking at kind of the inverse of that so looking at when we over feed people some people are tremendously resistant uh to weight gain and what we'll see is their energy expenditure just goes through the roof when we try to overfeed them i would suspect that if you're training reasonably well and trying your best to eat a lot um and failing to gain weight you're you're you know you probably call yourself a hard gainer is that still a term people still say that okay i think so i've been out of the world for a while um but i would imagine you know a hard gainer who's really doing well and failing to gain weight is probably one of those people that when we over feed you your energy expenditure goes up uh quite a bit and and there is evidence to indicate that the opposite is true that that some people seem to have this really tremendous adaptive component when they start losing weight other people um really don't seem to have as severe and an adaptive component and you know they they're kind of looking around at their peers going like why are you guys struggling with this weight loss like i'm doing fine um so i i'm not certain if there's any research showing that that's the same person that the person who struggles to gain weight uh when overfed is also the one who struggles to lose weight when underfed but i would expect there's at least a reasonable amount of carry over there just in talking with people who've coached a large number of clients you know they'll talk about how people that really really suffer from the metabolic adaptation during weight loss when they start to overfeed them once they get back to their normal body weight their body really doesn't like to budge too much above that and i would speculate that i'm probably close to being one of those people um in the sense that you know my body you know i usually like to walk around at like 175 or 180. if i get 5 or 10 pounds below that i'm immediately starving if i get five to ten pounds above that it's like i cannot get a bite of food in um now you can push through those cues big time um you know i've dream dreamer bulked and got huge and fat and gross and like that was fine um i i felt horrible the whole time because my body's cues were just kind of saying like dude this is it's too much for you um and then at the same time when i die it down um you know you kind of get to that place where your body's saying okay i'm starving and you can still push through that and you can still lose weight it just it sucks you know um so so my i'm my personal experience with it is that i'm probably one of the people that likes to stay in a pretty tight range and i i kind of see some adaptations going on in both sides you can still push through those but but they're there right so let's narrow in on the adaptation component now so is there a way or is there a series of ways that you can reduce the amount of adaptation so that you can continue to lose weight or break through these stalls and so on and so forth uh yeah so there's i would say whether you're someone who adapts a lot someone who doesn't adapt too much that certainly the goal should be to attenuate it as much as you can you know i i don't know a lot of people that are completely immune to this it's just exactly how much you're going to suffer from this so there's two approaches you can deal with the causes or you can deal with the effects you know and when it comes to dealing with the causes what we're talking about there is you know basically that the things contributing to this are how big is your energy deficit uh how long have you been dieting and how lean have you gotten um you'd like to keep getting lean so we'll leave that one alone like there's not much we can do about like that's just it is what it is but i would suggest that in terms of dealing with the causes a couple things you can do are try to have a slower rate of weight loss in general so a smaller acute deficit at any given time i would expect the body to resist that just a little bit less and there's obviously data showing that weight loss with slower rates of weight loss tends to be more favorable when we look at hormones when we look at the loss of lean tissue things of that nature another thing you could do is implement refeeds or diet breaks um and they're they're both the same kind of general idea is to take a break from being in a deficit um let your body kind of do its thing at maintenance for some amount of time and then you reintroduce the deficit a refeed is usually going to be one or two days a week whereas a diet break is going to be like a week or even two weeks that you are going back to maintenance calorie consumption the more i look at the data on it i would say if you're doing a refeed thing it's probably nice to do two refeeds in a row um you know we talked about how long does it take for metabolic adaptation to happen um we also have to consider if we're doing these non-linear approaches how long does it take of being at maintenance to actually see anything meaningful happen and i would say one day's probably not enough um when it comes to diet breaks there's some really cool there's a big study called the matador study that got published i think last year and what they did was two weeks of dieting two weeks of maintenance kind of on and off and it did appear based on their data to attenuate the magnitude of reduction and metabolic rate so i would say dealing with the causes that's what you can do take your time try to be if you if you can afford taking some pauses throughout diet breaks seem to be a really good thing for that now dealing with the effects i'm sorry were you going to say something yeah i was just going to pause on that for one second because i i've they covered that matador study i think in the the mass research review which you've you've written for and they sponsor my channel so it's my listeners should be familiar with it um one of the downsides of doing the diet break approach as opposed to just the straight deficit approach is that it took i think something like twice as long to actually get there so like at the at the end you did have better outcomes in terms of you know metabolic preservation or whatever you want to call it and i think they actually did see better fat loss as well but it took them twice as long so it's like if you're someone who doesn't want to be dieting for for 24 weeks but rather diet for 12 well maybe the diet break approach might be slowing you down in some sense right yeah oh definitely it will if you spend half your time at maintenance it's going to take you twice as long yeah you know um so i think the the question there would be what do you plan to do with this weight loss so if you're trying to induce anything resembling sustainable weight loss i would say take your time you know what's the rush if if you're trying to make this your new body weight for a meaningful amount of time take your time with it put in the types of strategies that can help you maintain that long term now if you're dieting for 12 weeks because you have a photo shoot and you really don't care how rapidly that weight comes back and you know three weeks after your photo shoot you're comfortable with being right back to normal body weight i mean you know i'm being uh extreme there but if you aren't trying to maintain this for any meaningful amount of time i i could see a case where you'd say screw it it's going to be 12 pretty bad weeks instead of 24 kind of bad weeks like that makes sense to me i can get on board with that so it just depends on what you're trying to do right right right um and i suppose it also depends maybe on how lean you're actually trying to get because just you know using myself as an example like i can probably get down to like maybe just below 10 uh body fat without really having to do any diet breaks or having to suffer too too much a reasonably low set point um once i try to dig below the eight percent zone i feel like i would respond actually much better to diet breaks and it's just going to take me so much longer just simply as a function of me wanting to get leaner uh so it yeah it depends on i guess where your end goal is also yeah yeah i would say what you know what you're what body fat you're trying to get to and also how extreme uh the overall magnitude of weight loss is going to be um you know so you're looking at you know how close to that minimum like four or five percent body fat level are you but also how far away from your normal body weight are you you know what i mean so so if you were walking around and you were like 360 pounds uh and you're trying to lose really substantial amounts of weight that might be an instance where you'd say you know we are just because of the sheer magnitude of weight loss the first portion sure just go ahead and get rid of the weight quick but at some point as you're really far below your kind of settling point that you were maintaining at that's where you might say okay we've done the initial phase of fat loss like you said getting down to you know everyone's got a number i can get down to this number very easily and then maybe once you get there that's when you would start implementing it and you can kind of have the best of both worlds where you you make the quick progress that doesn't hurt and then once you start to get to the kind of grinding portion that's where you would implement something like a diet break right right in the studies they kind of have to split them up into two strict groups but in the real world you can say well i'm gonna diet linearly with with no diet breaks until i get to that sticking point and then once i get there i can use this as a tool sort of thing yeah yeah um so i didn't want to interrupt you too much there let's get back to you so you addressed the the strategies for the causes now you're going to talk about the next part yeah so so once you kind of deal with what can we do to actually attenuate the causes of the problem then we start looking at what are some of the peripheral effects that we run into with the problem um and so certainly based on the hormonal changes we see uh we're going to be concerned about uh you know the potential loss of lean mass um looking at just the general state that you're in physiologically we're going to be concerned about performance decrements and you know if you spend 20 weeks or 10 weeks in this really kind of crappy grinding spot where your performance totally sucks that's not going to be a good thing for your outcomes you know if you're trying to you know get ready for something important where you want to be pretty pretty lean you know single digit type body fat for for a male it's not going to do any favors to train like crap for the last you know 10 weeks of that of that phase so i think slow rate of weight loss helps there we know that slower weight loss based on research and resistance trained people seems to help with lean mass retention it seems to help with attenuating some of the hormonal changes that we see it helps with maintaining performance so slow rate of weight loss deals not only with the causes but also with some of those downstream effects even in people that aren't getting particularly lean certainly you want to make sure you have an appropriate distribution of macronutrients when you start you know people worry about their macros in the off season but it's like wait until you're like late in a diet and then you start to see like i don't know what to do with these calories because like you know you want to have enough fat to support you know fat soluble vitamin absorption and even hormone production you certainly need enough protein to support lean mass and you want enough carbohydrate to support your training so that's where the hard macro decisions get made and that's where you have an opportunity to distribute those effectively and really help maintain lean mass maintain performance throughout the diet smart training is critical if if you train yourself into the dirt and you don't accommodate your impaired ability to recover when you put together your training you're probably going to regret that and exacerbate some of these problems and that's where cardio comes into play too i know for me the the best prep i ever had was when i did virtually no cardio uh in i kind of wasn't sure if i was prepping until i was halfway through but by the time i was halfway through i wasn't doing any cardio anymore and i just kept it that way because i think a lot of people they think okay well calories are low so i'll just cardio my way out of this problem but you know there's ample evidence of endurance athletes where we see that even in people that aren't intentionally trying to lose weight lean people who do really excessive amounts of cardio have some of these metabolic adaptation issues uh even in the absence of of really extreme caloric restriction i think a lot of people fail to account for the fact that uh cardio is not just negative calories it's also a recovery burden and if you're training in the weight room like crazy and you're doing cardio as if you're like preparing for a marathon something's got to give there like you have to try to manage your recovery and not eating and having sleep issues which are like two common things in prep like you don't have a lot of calories to work with a lot of people struggle to sleep well recovery becomes a very very very delicate balance there right right um okay those are great so uh i'd like to circle back and just touch on a couple of those strategies in a little little more detail so first i want to talk about rate of weight loss so you talked about dieting slow being a good strategy for not only preserving metabolic rate but also muscle mass yeah the slower you diet the you know the better your metabolism will probably stick around and your muscle will stick around better as well obviously we've already said the downside is that you have to diet for longer but that might be worth it just again depending on how lean you want to get or when your deadline is so let's just uh maybe break down what you would recommend in terms of a rate of weight loss like how how many pounds per week what's the size of the deficit how many calories should you slash that kind of thing yeah um it's tough i i think with rate of weight loss and another thing to keep in mind is that it probably shouldn't be totally linear like you should probably be able to afford a slightly higher rate of weight loss at the beginning than toward the end of a diet um i believe uh the numbers off the top of my head i suck with because i always like just make spreadsheets you know like i'll plug them in and then i'll just like follow it um i believe i usually recommend like at toward the beginning of a diet like one percent of body weight um let me double check my my number here yeah no worries that that sounds like a reasonable figure to me though one percent yeah if you're 200 pounds that's two pounds per week right yeah pretty good i would consider that to be like you know pretty moderate to slow i would say yeah yeah so pretty moderate i usually as an average that's about where i'm like comfortable saying like one percent of weight per week um if you're doing a totally linear approach sometimes i'm even cool with going down to as low as a half a percent per week toward the later end of the diet and if you're starting at a pretty high body fat i could even be comfortable going a little bit above one percent toward the beginning another thing to keep in mind is if you're implementing refeeds and diet breaks toward the end you can probably keep it at one percent during your weight loss kind of chunks and then go to maintenance and you know do whatever time you can get a four you can afford to get away with it maintenance and then go back to one percent right so i i usually kind of cluster around one percent um but it just it really depends on the context of how much fat you have to lose how long you've been dieting and whether or not breaks are a part of that diet process but yeah anywhere from half a percent to one percent is kind of the really nice conservative spot that that i generally kind of promote right um article lyle has a a pretty famous article on this and i think he outlines it as rate of weight loss according to a percent of deficit so like say you maintain your weight on 3000 calories if you slash i think it's 10 to 15 percent of that that would be like a slow rate of loss and then i think 15 to 20 percent would be something moderate and then 20 or 25 and above would be like a pretty rapid it'd be a pretty big deficit right yeah and then when you look at like starvation studies it tends to it's like 50 deficits like literally slash calories in half so yeah i feel like somewhere in the like like you said uh around one percent of body weight loss per week or like maybe in the 15 to 20 deficit range is like probably a reasonable ballpark for like more moderate styles of weight loss yeah i mean a lot of times what i'll do is uh kind of make sure we have a a pretty good idea of what someone's maintenance is um and if there's enough time to play with just drop their caloric intake by kind of a based on their body size 250 300 400 calories and just kind of see what kind of weight loss we're seeing with that because you know even if you put a number out there what you'll find is that based on how different people adapt in terms of overfeeding and underfeeding you might put in a caloric deficit that you expect a weight to just start falling off and there's nothing and you have to kind of nudge it forward again so there and a lot of times when people come in and you think you know their maintenance you actually don't um you know basically what you're seeing is that they adapt quite well to overfeeding so what you're seeing is kind of an inflated maintenance basically their body is kind of firing all on all cylinders to maintain and kind of make this high caloric intake seem like a maintenance if that makes sense and so you know we can see people whose metabolic rate is a little bit lower than predicted based on adaptive processes we can also see that in the other direction so for some people that are basically well adapted to kind of an overfeeding type caloric intake eric helms and i wrote a an article about this in like 2014 that like sometimes when people say oh i look at this huge change in my offseason intake compared to my prep intake you're looking at adaptation that happens in both directions so sometimes people are you know they're they start over feeding and they completely ramp up their metabolic rate and their non-exercise activity and they probably train a little bit harder and what you'll find is that it's kind of an inflated perception of what their maintenance truly is so i think i think you're on the money there with with the numbers you're putting out and but the problem is like you want to make sure that as a practitioner a coach an athlete whatever that you have enough wiggle room in your mental approach to acknowledge this might not pan out the way i expect it and adjust accordingly yeah that's such a good point it's so common for me to see it especially with men who have these super high maintenance calories in the off season like they'll be like i maintain on 4 500 calories and they're still decently lean in some cases um and then they're ready to start a cut and they're like okay i'm gonna slash 400 calories bring that down to 4 100 and that's going to get me losing and it just doesn't because it's like you said it's so artificially inflated beyond their true maintenance that they need to come all the way down to like i don't know 2 800 or something in some cases just to actually get losing right and and that isn't a huge gap below their true maintenance it's just that as you've said you know that they're what their perceived maintenance is so much higher than the true one yeah yeah it's super common it's funny that you say that uh i haven't seen it in a while but it's it's especially common with these guys who who have super fast off season metabolisms or super high caloric intakes anyway yeah and what you're seeing there is that they're probably they're you know even their resting metabolic rates probably through the roof when they're when they're feeding that way but also like their non-exercise activity is probably just insane they're probably just like rocking in their chair like their entire work day like and you see it like you'll make that initial drop and they just stop being that way but there's really no you're not seeing any weight loss happening you're like what's happening yeah and and that's that's probably what's going on yeah so so true yeah um well one thing i want to just bring up here is it it's it so basically as we're presenting it is is i would say like the modern old school way of looking at it it's like lose really slow and progressively and you'll preserve your muscle and preserve your metabolism recently as i'm sure you know things go in fitness circles there's been more of a push towards like well maybe crash dieting and faster rates of weight loss is okay you don't need to freak out you're not going to lose all your muscle you can get really lean doing this as long as you wait train and so on and so forth um one guy who's been uh talking about this a bit recently is martin mcdonald i don't know if you're familiar with with his work but i think he has done several uh uh he's written several article several articles and has uh dieted quite quickly himself and um what's your opinion on that i mean like how how important is rate of weight loss and how much of a risk for you know not only metabolic effects but also muscle loss is a faster rate of of weight loss in reality um i think generally i advocate slower rates um martin knows his stuff so i'm not uh you know attacking his approach in any way but i think when you look at the literature on rates of weight loss um it generally would either show it doesn't matter or it favors slower depending on the study you find and you know when we're talking about when the stakes are high and all else is equal i would say why not lean toward the direction of what we've seen to be favorable in a number of studies uh when it comes to uh you know changes in hormones and metabolic rate and muscle loss or lean tissue loss um although having said that um i don't think that a fairly rapid rate of weight loss is absolute suicide in terms of of making progress like what we might see is you still got down to five or six percent body fat but instead of you know you basically walked on stage with maybe half a kilogram or a kilogram less of lean mass or something like that that's not necessarily the end of the world especially if you're not dieting down to ultra low body fats and especially if you're not competing with you know a wnbf world title on the line so if someone is either non-competitive or just not super patient and says i don't want to spend 40 weeks dieting or 30 something weeks dieting let's do this thing in 14. you can make that happen they will get lean they'll probably have to use a bigger deficit than they would have otherwise but it's doable and they're not going to completely shrivel up and lose all of their lean tissue so it's a viable approach that can work especially when the end goal is not to get absolutely as lean as a person can get with the most amount of muscle a person could possibly have and when you talk about bodybuilding and physique competitions the goal is depending on your class but if you're a bodybuilder i want to be the most muscular person could possibly be with the smallest amount of body fat possible while still being alive and when that's the goal i think you have to really constrain your approach to what seems to be most supported by the literature right i could see even just from the performance side of things like the the faster you're losing weight by definition you're in a bigger deficit it's probably going to be harder to maintain your strength and performance in the gym which might be really a negative thing just in its own right and then also from a muscle muscle preservation perspective um yeah yeah on that note what is your general recommendation for training when in a caloric deficit do you kind of not really change anything do do you focus how i should frame this is should you focus more on keeping the weight on the bar and keeping your your strength up or should you focus on you know keeping the volume the same once you get to that point where you feel like your recovery is compromised um the the major change that i make um once you're in that spot where you reach a certain point in prep and i'm sure you've been there where glycogen just isn't part of your life anymore you know what i mean like you remember fondly a time where your muscles did in fact have glycogen in them in your liver but that's not your reality anymore and at that point i usually like to tone down the high repetition work um just because i'm sure you've been there late in prep you put on a load you're like okay let's do 12 and then you hit seven and it's weird there's just nothing in the tank like you don't feel like the burning and the acidosis or anything like that it's just your muscles tap out yeah you know so one thing that i like to do is shift my training volume more toward doing sets that are higher loads with lower repetitions if you can maintrain if you can shift your your repetition range lower and maintain the volume fine that's good but at a certain point i am you know pretty willing to acknowledge like hey my recovery just isn't what it used to be it's probably time to try to maintain the intensity and drop the volume just a little bit to see if we can preserve what lean tissue is there now i know i have seen people advocate the opposite and they say when i'm in prep i like to do high rep stuff because the injury risk is lower um and i could see both sides but for me i just i don't like getting into those super glycolytic rep ranges where you're relying on glycogen that just simply isn't there i i actually totally agree with you um it's it's funny because most people recommend the exact opposite it's like oh you're in a cutting phase you need to bump up the reps to start burning more calories and so on and so forth but from my perspective that's just not going to create that same tensile stimulus on the muscle that i think heavyweight would and if you have this reserved capacity for volume that you can tolerate it makes more sense i think to allocate more of that towards heavier loads that are going to generate more tension obviously not like power lifting style like one to four rep stuff but i think that more in that like you know reasonable five to ten six to twelve whatever zone makes makes more sense to me and like you said kind of start to like wean off the the really ultra high rep stuff yeah and i'm gonna make uh an analogy here that is not based in science but it feels sciencey enough but when you look at someone with a really high vo2 max like an aerobic athlete and for whatever reason they can't train for for a while the way that they everyone in sports since the dawn of time has dealt with that has been to maintain intensity in workouts and just sacrifice the volume generally speaking what you can see for a broad range of training adaptations and a lot of different modalities is that the way to maintain things you know look at like a team sport like a you know like an american football team their in their time in the weight room often gets cut down during the competitive season the way that they try to deal with that is to keep the intensity high and simply sacrifice some of the volume at the ex you know save the intensity sacrifice the volume because you can't have both so i think that as a very general principle i think the body tends to do pretty well with maintaining adaptations when we keep the intensity high even if we can't necessarily keep the volume quite as high completely non-scientific very analogous but it's a thing that we see in different kind of components of exercise literature yeah it makes sense and there's i i think you can i think you can pass that as a science-based i mean there's sports physiology papers on on that sort of measuring those sorts of outcomes even if there isn't something on exactly what we're talking about i feel like it's not a stretch to extrapolate it um but before we move on to the post diet stuff so like reverse dieting bulking whatever um i'd like to have you comment on starvation mode because i feel like that's a concept that kind of ties into a lot of what we've been talking about here in terms of metabolic slowdown is that bro science or is there some truth to it so yeah my understanding of like starvation mode is that to me it registers as just like a very dramatic interpretation of metabolic adaptation um basically people say oh i'm in starvation mode so you know i can't lose any more weight or i'm even gaining weight despite the fact that i'm in a deficit that stuff there's no um there's no basis for that uh scientifically um i i still like there are responses to semi starvation that are measurable and that make your weight loss a little more difficult and we call that metabolic adaptation but but when it comes to starvation mode there's not a single person on the planet who is immune to starvation like you'll never run into a thing where it's like oh jeff you look terrible you've gained a lot of fat what happened it's like i just stopped eating you know like uh yeah it was a rough time like no it's never happened and there's never been a person who it's like you know their strategy for weight loss is i better start eating more calories every day that doesn't that doesn't pan out you know so the starvation mode thing like you're not losing weight because you're eating too little i will never get on board with that [Music] yeah i i totally agree it's funny and you do hear it sometimes like you will hear people give that crazy counter-intuitive advice uh to avoid starvation mode but it just makes absolutely no sense um and all you have to do is look at people who are actually starving on our planet and they all look emaciated well and like the thing that kills me is like you like dogs jeff uh i don't have a dog myself but yeah i like dogs i don't have one either but i like them yeah and talk to any dog owner and it's like i went to the vet and my dog's too fat so what did the vet tell you to do put another half cup in the morning like no every when when it's not us it's very easy to make the decision say oh well the dog's too fat it's probably eating too much so we'll probably give it less food like it's very straightforward when you look at like agriculture literature of like fattening up livestock it's never been a difficult concept of like if you want them to be less fat feed them less if you want to be more fat feed them more so i i just because eating is so ingrained into like everything we do and because it's so personal for us we don't like to let it be that simple so we're like oh it's i'm doing everything i can so it's starvation mode or something but no like just whenever i'm in like whenever i'm like trying to convince people it's like think of your dog when it's too fat you just give it less food and it works 100 of the time um one thing that i ran into because i've covered this before and i've kind of talked about how almost exactly what you just said how starvation mode is kind of this like sensationalist term to maybe describe like an extreme case of metabolic adaptation that doesn't really exist but if you soften the definition of starvation mode enough you might in fact be able to see that it does describe these groups of people who are on very low calories yet still not losing weight and to them it might seem really real like i'm eating 1200 calories today as a woman for example and i i've completely stalled and i'm not even that lean yet that really seems like starvation mode to them right um however you know as i'm sure you know but that there are other explanations for why they've stalled other than starvation mode for one they're that you know they're as we've talked about their levels of neat have probably dropped they probably used to be fidgeting a whole bunch and walking to and from the car more often they just avoid doing that now subconsciously and also there's a whole other issue of water retention that we could get into but it probably tends to exacerbate as you get leaner and leaner and uh more fixated on your weight loss that isn't happening so yeah i would say those are probably the two main culprits for starvation mode um in reality yeah and the water retention thing is huge man like cortisol absolutely induces water retention and no one has more cortisol than someone who's weight training like crazy dieting doing cardio like crazy like crazy and is stressed out like that if you were trying to like induce high cortisol levels those would be your main cards you would play and i remember one of my preps in like 2013 i made a calorie drop nothing was happening and i i was at first pretty frustrated and then a few days into it i was like okay i'm just gonna not enter the gym for about four days and immediately like multiple pounds fell off at a time where i was just chip it was like late in prep chipping away at the last few pounds and it was just this enormous drop in weight that was yeah i was just over trained not recovering and stressing out too much about it sometimes the best thing for that with these people who think they're in like starvation mode is like the most counter-intuitive thing let's eat maintenance for a couple days don't go anywhere near the gym and let's just wait it out and usually that helps out quite a bit right okay so there's two other topics that they're pretty big ones that i want to cover yeah i think we can do it in the next in the next 20 minutes that's the challenge so the first one is medical is that you being polite and saying quit uh quit rambling no it's actually just like i feel like there's so many more avenues i can explore with what we've already done yeah i really like talking about this stuff and it's been a while i i've been focusing so much on training on my channel recently uh that it's it's a pleasure to talk about nutrition and metabolic stuff again um but yeah also keep it keep it quick so so metabolic damage is a is basically we talked about it earlier but what sparked all this controversy to do with metabolic adaptation to begin with so i think that the metabolic damage claim if you're gonna define it like i think in the most sensible way is that it's literally what it says your metabolism gets damaged to the from previous weight loss so you lost weight now your metabolism is damaged so you say you regain your weight back because you have a slow metabolism now it's going to be really difficult for you to lose weight again because it's like a permanent slow down in your metabolism do you think first do you agree on that that definition of it nothing's permanent jeff in any context right but no i i can't no metabolic down regulation is not permanent it is recoverable but more egregious down regulations with very egregious approaches to weight loss can take more effort to induce recovery more effort and more time right right okay that makes sense so what what is the the time course for that recovery generally speaking well recovery is multifaceted it involves you know bringing hormones back to normal levels restoring components of both lean tissue and fat tissue getting metabolic rate back to normal and total energy expenditure back to normal i would say in the interest of being concise for most physique athletes that are doing things pretty logically you start to see pretty sufficient recovery within four to six months after a competition just looking at case studies and looking at some small studies in groups of people there are aspects that take longer to recover even one of the things that's like really hard to recover and and often takes a very long time is restoring normal uh menstrual cycles and female competitors and it's not a typical to see that take uh over a year to come back and be fully regular um so the time course depends on how lean you got how rapidly you regain your weight um how you manage your training load after the weight loss phase there's a lot that goes into it but i'd say within the first four to six months a lot of the recovery happens assuming that you're not clinging to like competition level body fat um but beyond that there are some aspects menstrual cycle regularity um restoring kind of a normal i hate to use this kind of cliche term but a normal relationship with food and kind of re re-uh uh becoming more reacquainted with what it feels like to have some fat on your body psychologically a lot of times that takes even a little more time right on the metabolic damage point so there's still a lot of people who believe in this it was more in vogue to believe it four or five years ago people who were proponents of this basically had two lines one was there's some rodent research showing that the fat cells have memory so basically if you dieted to a really low level of body fat before you remember that and your body prevents it in the future i don't know if that's ever been shown in humans but there was whatever there was that in rats and then also there are all these anecdotes of especially women who dieted to very low levels of body fat put the weight back on and now all of a sudden really struggle to get it off again so if metabolic damage doesn't explain that what what does and why do you think metabolic damage doesn't explain it um i think probably so we look at a case of someone who has more body fat than they expected and is struggling more than they thought with weight loss so you know we talked about during the weight loss phase what might be contributing to that it could be water retention related issues inappropriate management of the training load it could be even sometimes people aren't as good as they thought at tracking their calories those are things that could acutely explain it when it comes to the long-term stuff like we do see that uh whether it's you know like human athletes that there's in some papers a correlation between how many cut and regain cycles they had and what their bmi is later in life um i think what really tends to happen is that uh the down regulation of energy expenditure can persist for an appreciable amount of time and in many cases won't be fully reversed until the weight or the fat is regained and the lean tissue is regained and it takes a while to regain the lean tissue um there's some really cool evidence showing that hyperphagia after copper competition the or after weight loss that kind of excessive hunger persists until you've regained all the lean tissue that was lost i think in a lot of cases what's happening is people are dieting down getting lean they are gaining in some cases more body fat than they lost or they're failing to fully recover their lean tissue and it's putting them in a spot where their their energy expenditure based on their body mass is still lower than they thought now if they fully recover their lean tissue in many cases they do it after overshooting their body fat and so now when they when they die it down certainly it's harder to diet down from a higher body fat than from a lower body fat i think that's a big role also there's some studies showing that again if you don't really give your body time to recover from a dieting phase and re-establish uh your normal energy expenditure at your normal body weight you know down regulation and energy expenditure can persist for up to years if you maintain a reduced body weight so in many cases i would suggest that people who don't allow themselves to you know kind of go back to a normal settling point and actually maintain it for a while they're probably already they probably are beginning their prep with some degree of metabolic rate suppression and so i would imagine that makes it look even more rigorous uh when it you start with suppression and then it only gets worse from there so i don't believe that there's some kind of metabolic uh permanent damage that can't be reversed i just think that the more you kind of the more extreme the adaptations are the more thoughtful and patient you have to be with actually facilitating recovery before you begin the next weight loss phase and if you fail to do that you're probably going to start your next prep with either a lower energy expenditure or a higher body fat right i've seen this myself quite a bit in bikini competitors who try to do consecutive seasons so that they'll they'll compete one year get get very lean and then decide you know six months later they're going to start a diet for another show the very next year and i'll find i would say the majority of the time that they actually find it much harder on the second prep than the first prep and it's really easy i find to just attribute this to metabolic damage as well your you know your your metabolism is still damaged from the last prep but as you say it could very well be due to the fact that they lost muscle while they were dieting down the first time six months later haven't fully regained all of that lean mass back yet might have even overshot their fat mass so now their starting body composition is worse the second time than it was the first time and that can lead to all kinds of psychological effects stress you out more make it more difficult for just the simple fact that you have more fat to lose uh and so on and so forth and then also it could also be that um in some cases maybe it does take a little longer than six months for metabolic rate to to fully come back to normal um so i i would say that depending on the extremity of your diet you you'll want to make sure you have plenty of recovery time before you decide to do the next one if it's if it's more extreme in nature but i would say that mostly applies to people who are getting really really lean like quite a bit below what their set point is i would imagine most people probably listening to this are maybe more interested in achieving a good level of leanness where they might you know have visible labs but not like glute striations um or you know define let's say defined abs rather than invisible abs what would be your approach for maintaining that type of a physique uh you know after the diet has ended so you died it down you got your abs what do you do now yeah and that's a great point is that you know i often write about metabolic adaptation and i always write from this like it's hard to get out of your own perspective and my perspective is probably a lot like yours which is i have to get rid of all the fat like if if it doesn't hurt when i sit down on a chair because my glutes still have fat the diet didn't work you know what i mean so it's important to remember kind of remind yourself that not not everybody's looking for that and really very few people should be looking for that you know if you're not a competitive bodybuilder then why do you want your glutes to be you know well-defined it's it's it's too much um but no from that perspective it's always important to remember that the stuff we talk about with metabolic adaptation is far less in magnitude and the idea of maintaining that body weight is far more realistic and actually not a terrible idea you know no one should be maintaining five percent body fat um but if you want to get down to 9 or 10 and maintain it that's that's totally fine and actually probably quite quite doable for a lot of people the way to do that would be again i really think you want to deal with some of these problems on the front end if the goal is long term sustaining it long term i would take a slow rate of weight loss and i would try to incorporate diet breaks if i could and that's kind of part of the slow rate of weight loss right i mean you're essentially i don't think you necessarily need to go two weeks and two weeks like the matador study but if maybe every fourth week you go up to maintenance i think that might be a middle ground that that you could kind of shoot for but i would say slow rate of weight loss to deal with those problems on the front end and then once you get to that goal that goal um body weight and you're trying to maintain it i would say certainly immediately go to maintenance calories across the board no need for the non-linearity anymore because the non-linearity is only helpful because you must have a deficit and you're trying to just deal with it you know but if you're not losing weight anymore you don't need a deficit and you should just be in a constant diet break where you're eating at maintenance but just just to clarify by non-linearity you basically mean doing refeeds or diet breaks so you don't right feeds yeah yeah yeah the only point of those refeeds and diet breaks is to give your body a rest from being in a deficit and the only reason you're in a deficit is because you want to continue losing more weight so i would say immediately get back to maintenance if you want to have some days that are a little above maintenance just to kind of mix things up that's where you could maybe do some non-linear stuff just to have maybe a low day to accommodate like a big cookout you're excited to go to right but i would say get to maintenance and this is where i would say you can probably start creeping up your caloric intake just a little bit keep an eye on your body fat or your body weight um and your body fat you know but keep an eye on your progress i i think some people can get away with kind of if there is any metabolic adaptation or metabolic suppression present with a very patient approach you can probably increase your calories at a slow enough rate that you are accommodating that uh with you know essentially subconscious increases in non-exercise activity or maybe restoration of maybe a small down regulation of the resting metabolic rate um so this kind of leads us into the concept of reverse dieting right and the one thing i always really want to stress to people is that reverse dieting is not a way to supercharge your metabolism or give you anything more than what you were born with all we're trying to do there is basically coax the body out of that suppressed state by saying hey we're at maintenance if not a little bit above you know we don't have to keep constraining resting energy expenditure and constraining non-exercise activity and i think in some cases with people that respond quite well to it you can see that as they slowly increase their calories they also are slowly kind of undoing some of that suppression uh especially if they're not at a critically lean body fat level right um when it comes to reverse dieting let's quickly split this up into two different groups so you have one group of people who are dieting to get shredded for a competition so anyone men's physique bikini natural bodybuilders whatever uh what's your approach after the the diet so after the competition has ended for them do you find reverse dieting appropriate in that context or what what do you what do you say for those people yeah so uh this is where i would lean more toward recovery dieting so it's kind of two sides of the same coin in my opinion so like jeff albertson 3d mj as far as i know kind of coined the term recovery diet because what they were finding i'm kind of putting words in their mouth but it seems like they were finding that people were obsessed with this very slow increase in calories after getting extremely lean and they were basically not facilitating their recovery from prep sufficiently so if you're getting extremely lean and you're doing anything resembling like a competition prep you should be doing something that's more more resembles a recovery diet i think there's a lot of factors that go into how quickly calories should be increased after a weight loss attempt a lot of factors um now if you're a bodybuilder who got super lean and you are not going to compete again for a while and you are not at your genetic limit for muscle growth or you know muscle mass it's really hard to justify spending that much time at such a low body fat with all the hormonal adaptations that come with it you need to get into a spot where your body can actually start making improvements and putting on lean mass and recovering from what you just put it through that is a very different circumstance from a person who has no intention to gain you know substantial amounts of lean mass beyond what they have they're at a very reasonable maintainable body fat and they don't intend to do any more weight loss or weight gain cycles in a long time that's the case where you could maybe do a much slower approach increase calories just a little bit but you're going to reach a limit like you're not going to reverse diet until you're like you know what i'm i'm still an eight percent body fat but i eat you know 6 000 calories a day um i mean maybe if you're training like an absolute monster maybe but in most cases all you're trying to do there is you get down to the the weight that you want to maintain at and you just kind of see what you can get away with you know some people can probably coax their their uh caloric intake up just a little bit and start to undo a little bit of suppression that's present and they might say you know what with this process of trying to kind of titrate my caloric intake up a little bit now i can afford a couple hundred more calories a day which is not negligible you know maybe 100 or 200 or something like that just gives you a little bit more wiggle room in the diet but you know i i don't like to set people's expectations to this idea that they're going to get down to really low body fat levels reverse diet gain no fat fully recover and now they're like five percent body fat and eating until they feel sick i i don't see that as as a reality uh for any significant number of people yeah there's really no way to shortcut it i i've found like even if you were to say reverse your way up to four thousand calories you'd still feel terrible because your body fat would be so low and you'd have to expend so much energy with cardio which you'd barely be able to get your way through i mean either way being at that very depleted state regardless of food intake is gonna suck uh it's for most people it's gonna feel yeah and well like i mean what we're seeing is that these effects are because we are we have low availability of energy and if you are very very lean and not gaining fat you still have low energy availability i don't care how many calories you're putting in clearly what's happening is that you're burning all of them so as you said you're still miserable and you're still not recovered right now i want to talk about reverse dieting in the context of let's say someone like myself so at the moment i'm running something of an extended mini cut i don't want to commit to calling it a cut so it's an extended mini cut but in any case once i get to the point where i feel like my abs are a little bit more defined i'll probably end the the cut uh so i i would imagine somewhere in the you know eight nine ten percent body fat range is where i want to get to um now at this point i'm not gonna i don't feel like i'm really gonna need a recovery per se so i feel like the recovery diet wouldn't really be appropriate in that context but yet it would be cool to try to maintain this level of leanness the best i can while still eating more because even if i say feel the same and even if it's only just being burned off through extra expenditure 200 extra calories 300 400 whatever however high i can push it is still more food that i get to eat so it's still positive and it's still probably going to fuel my performance a little bit better so in that context i feel like a kind of a slow reverse diet actually is a good idea um assuming that your goal is to stay leaner right i would say that is kind of the perfect picture of like where it makes sense to do a kind of slower reverse diet is you're not at a body fat that's absolutely brutal it's potentially maintainable and you know you're comfortable enough that you don't need to recover from what you've done that is where it makes sense to say again the way i view reverse dieting is can we just kind of induce a little bit more inefficiency with how we're using calories just to buy us a little bit of wiggle room in the diet it's not going to make you feel different it's not going to induce any kind of recovery which you won't need the only other you know really great application aside from just trying to re-establish a settling point or re-establish kind of a a maintenance level the only other time i can really see it making sense is if you are a really high-level bodybuilder or physique athlete that hasn't you basically have decided i don't intend to gain any more lean mass i compete frequently and so basically what i'm trying to do is because i compete frequently i need to stay kind of with shot of of my stage weight or i'm at a point with my muscle mass where the only thing i could feasibly do to perform better as an athlete is to come in leaner and leaner each time so if your sole focus then is going to be on getting absolutely as lean as a person can get and you don't really need to take an off season of muscle building which few are in this position but i could at least theoretically see a case where you say you know what we will delay recovery a little bit assuming there's no like clinically relevant symptoms that we really are concerned about and we'll take our time and make sure we really do this the right way so that next time we're on stage it'll like will be so lean it'll change the world and will forever set the standard for what a physique looks like that's a very rare case but i think your ex your kind of application is perfect yeah yeah shout out to the one person listening who who this yeah yeah i'm sure you're out there somewhere well man that has been super informative it's been a real pleasure to chat i feel like i'm gonna need to get you on again and talk about some of your other work because this is just such a small sliver of it um what i think i'll do is link your your research gate profile uh down below so people can go and have a look at some of the other stuff you've done and i know that you're you're working uh with uh stronger by science now writing articles over there and curating research and that kind of thing so i'll link some of your work there as well and you wrote a really nice piece uh summarizing a bunch of this stuff uh for the mass research review um only subscribers will be able to get it but i'll i'll put the link for that down down there as well uh people would like to check it out but eric thanks so much for your time man yeah thanks for having me um yeah anyone that wants to get in touch um i'm trying to be better about being on social media since i'm not living in the lab anymore so uh you know reach out to me on facebook and instagram and twitter and all that stuff and i should have a very very very long thorough article about metabolic adaptation refeeds and reverse dieting um it's done i just don't know when it's gonna officially come out but um keep an eye on stronger by science.com and uh it's it's basically like i think close to 20 000 words of everything i've ever thought about basically everything we just discussed amazing um well if you can get it out before saturday i'll link it otherwise uh great i'll do it later but anyway man it's been a pleasure i'd love to get you back on and chat about some some supplement stuff so and anyone who's listening um you can stay tuned for that eric's tremendously knowledgeable about supplements so uh something we can talk about anyway man uh thanks for coming on uh make sure you guys show eric some support go over check out his social media platforms and send him a message let me know you enjoyed this show leave me a like if you're on youtube don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already i'll see you guys [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jeff Nippard

Views: 1,716,546

Keywords: iifym, science, bodybuilding, lose weight, fat, fitness, natural bodybuilding, eric trexler, jeff nippard eric trexler, jeff nippard metabolism, jeff nippard reverse dieting, reverse dieting, reverse diet, metabolic damage, starvation mode, layne norton, rapid fat loss, how to reverse diet, interview, how to increase metabolism, metabolic adaptation, flexible dieting, slow metabolism, how to boost metabolism, reverse dieting for fat loss, reverse dieting jeff nippard

Id: xiYJW9pViaM

Length: 73min 48sec (4428 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 16 2019