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Welcome to the Primal Potential Podcast, the incremental anti-diet solution for effective permanent weight loss.

Primal Potential is committed to helping you overcome emotional eating, hormonal imbalances, unhealthy habits, and your dieting mindset through education and inspiration.

We don't just talk about what you should eat and what you should avoid. We talk strategy.

Primal Potential is bridging the gap between knowing and doing. Each episode will leave you with concrete tips from making positive changes that make a difference.

Primal Potential is here to help you lose weight, get healthy, and master fat loss naturally.

Hey guys, thanks for coming back for a Q&A episode of the Primal Potential Podcast. I am so glad that you're here.

Today we're going to tackle a common listener question. It's been a while since we've done one of these Q&A episodes. I know I'm slacking, but keep the questions coming and I will keep answering them. I promise.

Today's question is about calories. We've talked a lot in past episodes about how extreme calorie deficits actually impair our ability to burn fat.

Extreme calorie deficits, when we go on these crashed diets, when we cut calories, they send a signal to your body that danger is imminent, fuel is in short supply, and so your body responds by getting really conservative to protect you.

Your body will slow down your metabolic rate and inhibit fat burning because you might need that precious fuel, and it also up regulates hunger and cravings to trigger you to eat.

But the other side of that coin is that we do need a moderate calorie deficit. If we're looking for fat loss, we do need to take in slightly less fuel than the body needs to operate.

Because if we take in just enough fuel or too much fuel, the body never needs to tap into our fuel reserves or our body fat to help meet its energy needs. Right? Your body is very efficient. It's not like, hey, so look in a little chunky.

Today would be a good day to burn some body fat. It doesn't work that way. Creating an energy deficit, a calorie deficit, is the only way the body will use your stored body fat for energy. Right?

Now the other side of that equation is hormone balance. Without the right hormonal environment, which fortunately we can create with our food and lifestyle choices, the body is actually more likely to burn your precious,

metabolic, reactive muscle tissue than your body fat. But that's a whole other thing. Today we're talking about calories. And this idea of a moderate or mild calorie deficit is what really trips people up and they start to freak out a little bit.

And I've gotten a ton of questions asking, so how many calories should I eat and how do I know if I've created this calorie deficit? And those are great questions. And I completely understand why so many of you are asking them.

Now for those of you who have emailed me, you might feel a little frustrated when I don't give you, like, well, here's the calorie range that you should shoot for based on your height and your weight and your activity level. There is no magic calorie number. And diet plans out there or nutrition professionals out there that push these arbitrary calorie ranges, 1,200, 1,200, 2,500, those people make me crazy.

Honestly, they frustrate the heck out of me. You can use that as a starting point to evaluate your own body and your unique energy needs. That's fine. But if you're looking for a prescription for calories, you won't find it in a book, you won't find it on a podcast, you won't find it in a blog articles, you're kind of wasting your time and energy.

And the reason for that is because our body's energy needs are totally unique to us. And there are so many factors that influence how many calories your body needs, things like your age, your degree of hormone balance or lack thereof, which particular hormones are imbalanced, not just overall, but on a day to day basis.

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