I bring you back to the caveman era. We might be living in the twenty-first century but our bodies are still operating with caveman-era principles. How do we develop muscle? We must provide a stimulus for the body to adapt to a muscle group. From a survival standpoint, our body does not want to add muscle mass. It is extremely calorically expensive. Our body’s goal is survival, not maximum human performance. The body always wants to do as much as possible with as little muscle mass as possible to perform our daily, weekly, and biweekly tasks.

Fat is one of the body’s most amazing functions to me. Fat stores energy in times of caloric surplus. Fat is not the enemy, it is a gift from our survival skill set. If we as humans did not have the ability to store fat we most likely would not have survived famine hardships when food was scarce. Without fat, we all would be substantially less able as humans. Now, there is a flip side. Too much fat will have long-term chronic negative health effects damaging our bodies over time. Healthy levels of fat vary between genders due to natural hormone production. I am not here to tell you what is too much fat or too little. Your personal goals whether for sports or health should determine your fat level. Not your emotional state while choosing food to consume. Do not be aimless with your resolve, have direction and focus.

Losing fat weight may be challenging but is very simple. There are three different scenarios in all possibilities. A caloric surplus, caloric maintenance, and a caloric deficit. Now just as there is such a possibility as being in a severe caloric surplus where it is unhealthy, there is such a thing in being in such a severe caloric deficit where your body will decide to break down your muscle tissue for energy resulting in stagnating your muscle tissue ability to recover and perform well. In such a state, it is generally better to find a maintenance phase caloric level so you may continue to perform well in exercises first and then lose fat weight at a reasonable pace. We call this finding your baseline caloric maintenance. Then once you find your baseline you can then make calculated progression by either being in a caloric surplus to gain weight or a caloric deficit to lose weight.

Being in a caloric deficit either from cutting back food consumption, keeping your exercises relatively the same or maintaining regular food consumption, and increasing the amount of physical activity you do to increase the calories that you burn throughout the day. Most people will cut food which is completely fine as long as you still get a healthy diet of macro and micronutrients.

The body will never question what physical activity we, as humans are performing as long as our mind commands and internally accepts us to do. Now commanding the mind, that's a different challenge altogether when pushing yourself hard in physical activity.