Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:00

Welcome to the Deficient Vegans Podcast. This is episode 43. I'm the muscle deficient vegan here with the protein deficient vegan. Do you want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:06

Hi!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:06

Hi, everybody. So this week, we're going to talk about why your fitness tracker might be sabotaging your calorie deficit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:12

What isn't sabotaging your calorie deficit?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:15

That's a really good point. And we'll also cover our myth of the week, which is that serving sizes on nutrition labels actually matter and are useful.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:22

And aren't just a marketing gimmick?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:23

No. Well, we'll see. But first up, new news.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:27

New news!

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:29

So a vegan bodybuilder named Joe DiMarco set a Guinness World Record. He is 61 years old and did 602 toes-to-bar crunches, kind of, in one hour.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:41

But like on a bar.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:43

Yeah. So this is where you hang on a pull-up bar and then you do kind of like a leg raise, but all the way up to where your feet touch the pull-up bar.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:50

That's way harder than a crunch.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:51

It's way harder, yeah. And you have to hang. Of course, he doesn't do it the entire time. He gets off and rests. It's just how many can you do in an hour, no matter how you do it.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 0:58

That's crazy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 0:59

Yeah. The old record was like 430, I think, something like that. And he did 602.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:03

Okay. I have many questions, but like... A, how do you find out you're good at this and like good enough to even look into the Guinness World Record? And like also, are there Guinness World Records for like all different exercises?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:19

Yeah, I don't know. So this is actually, I guess, a common move in CrossFit and gymnastics. So I'm guessing he probably joined CrossFit at some point and started doing these. And he's like, well, I can do these all day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:28

He just realized he's the guy. Yeah. This is his mission in life. Could you make up an exercise and then get a Guinness record for it?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:37

Yeah, I mean, maybe. They all got made up somewhere, right? You have to figure out with the Guinness Commission how you have to do that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:43

Remember those Guinness World Record books, like, when we were kids?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:46

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:47

The only one I really remember is the lady with, like, the longest fingernails.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:52

That's the one I remember.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:53

That was super gross.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:55

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 1:55

They, like, curled into each other.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 1:57

But impressive. I mean, I obviously wouldn't want it. but it stresses me out i think those are cool because it's like a lot of those things most people wouldn't want to do but it's cool to see what can be done okay

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:08

Yeah what i don't want to do i don't know i don't even like if i have like whites of my fingernail showing.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:15

Like yeah cut those off

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:17

It starts making me kind of anxious.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:19

You could do like longest hair though i

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:20

Don't know i think there was a longest hair.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:22

I'm sure there is yeah i don't i don't know yeah anyway seems like a lot. Lots of crazy stuff in those books for sure.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:28

It's funny that the nails stick with everyone. Mm-hmm. It was pretty wild to look at.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:33

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:33

Ugh.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:35

I feel like that one will probably never be beat, the nails.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 2:38

No. It gives me a physical reaction just thinking of it, and I haven't seen that picture in, like, over 20 years.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 2:45

Next piece of news is there's a vegan sushi chain called Planta that has been really popular. A lot of celebrities talk about it over the years. They had, like, 18 locations, and now they are shutting down completely. They had a reorganization attempt last year, I guess, kind of part of a bankruptcy. And they ended up closing like half their restaurants, but it sounds like that wasn't enough to make it work. So they're closing down operations entirely. They are the sister company to another, I guess, an Asian restaurant chain called Planta Queen. Although we've been there and I don't really remember it being particularly Asian. That's how it was described.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:22

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:23

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:26

I have many feelings on this um they also did this thing where they sent out a survey being like how would you guys feel if we threw animal products on the menu and they got a lot of backlash and then they were like oh we were never gonna do it do.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:39

You know if that was from planta or planta queen

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:40

I think it was from i did not know they were different because i.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:44

Didn't either apparently

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:45

Their social media i think is run by the same i.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 3:48

Think it's the same owners it's just two different

Protein Deficient Vegan: 3:50

Brands right but i'm saying like i think their social media is combined yeah like planta and planta queen are under the same social media so like i think i don't know but i think it was planta queen because it was sending it out to chicago people yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:03

I think a lot of restaurants are having difficulty right now the uh article we that was part of this that we specifically saw uh was saying you know a lot of non-vegan restaurants are also having a lot of trouble in closing down the vegan restaurants at a slightly higher percentage but it's not really specifically affecting vegan restaurants really

Protein Deficient Vegan: 4:19

Yeah i think i saw something about the slutty vegan uh franchise too was having some issues yeah but i think the problem is like the vegan space is pretty new and i don't think anyone really knows like what what is like the full amount of money that can be made in the space restaurant wise and so like throwing out a bunch of franchises when you don't know if you actually have enough people to support that i think is i don't know maybe a pretty uh yeah wild move i.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 4:51

Think it's also tricky maybe with the vegan space because there are a lot of different types of vegans as far as the food goes. There's like raw vegans. There's like super healthy whole food vegans. I mean, this really applies to non-vegans too, but specifically with vegans, they're a little more dogmatic about it. And then there's like vegans who just want to eat like soul food, junk food kind of stuff. So having all those options at one restaurant is a little tricky.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:12

Yeah, especially like you're dealing with such a small number of the population and then now you start like parsing it out into like even smaller subsets. It gets a little dicey. yeah plus i mean i don't really want to talk super shit about a company that's failing but like we went there a few times and, It was very overpriced for what you got.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:31

They definitely tried to focus a lot more on experience and ambiance than they did the food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:36

And by experience, we mean it looked pretty. I don't even particularly remember the waiters being overly friendly or anything. It was just like, let's buy a super expensive building and make it look fancy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:48

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:49

That doesn't impress me at all.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 5:51

I'm just saying, I think that's what they were going for. I'm not saying they hit the mark there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 5:54

No, I think so, too. I think it was like, let's get the most Instagrammable restaurant situation we can. And, like, yeah, I think that goes so far. But at some point, people want good food.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:05

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:06

I don't know. That's just my opinion.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:07

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:09

I'd rather go to Alice and Friends, which is a very, like, humble restaurant.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:13

No, that's an Asian.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:14

That's an actual Asian restaurant. And you walk in and it's, like, it's not, like, overly decorated. They're not, like, buying, like, the biggest, most outlandish building on the corner. It's just, you know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:25

But everything on the menu is a banger.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:27

Every fucking thing on the menu slaps. That's the kind of vegan restaurants I support.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:33

Yeah. I don't know. And it's a big menu. It's a big menu. It's a big menu. I've never found anything on there that wasn't amazing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:37

No, it's all really good. Yeah. So, anyway. But, no, it is sad to see vegan restaurants failing, though.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 6:42

Yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 6:43

But I think it'll be interesting, kind of, to see how it shakes out. And, like, I think you won't really know for a while, like, Where it lands, like, how many consumers overall do you actually have? Like, how many vegan, fully vegan restaurants can a city actually support? And I don't think we really know that, because, like, we're seeing a lot of ones closed down in Chicago.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:02

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:03

So... Support the restaurants you love. Otherwise, they may close.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:08

Yeah, for sure. And then the last piece of news we have is Unibio, a Danish fermentation startup, back on our fermentation thing here.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:16

We love fermentation.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:17

This one's a little different, though. They're partnering with a Saudi Arabian investment group to build a facility that's going to produce proteins from greenhouse gases.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:26

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 7:27

We're going to turn gas into protein now.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 7:29

Yeah, this one is really interesting. So I looked it up and it seems like it's taking off gas, maybe from like refineries or something that they have there, which are like mostly methane for the most part or like hydrogen. And so I don't know if you guys know this, but most proteins are there's like a few different chemical configurations of protein. But basically it's like carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur and nitrogen. So this one, it looked like it was taking methane, ammonia and oxygen. i think and then now it's going to make protein out of that which is really interesting um yeah i kind of wonder that you know there's a lot of refiners in the u.s, so maybe we can set up local sites of this in the u.s instead of having to like pull in stuff from saudi.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:16

Arabia yeah i

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:17

Mean that was danish but yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:18

I think that'd be cool i mean any this is another one where it's like we can make protein in a way that doesn't really use animals at all in this case yeah so i think any options like that are are definitely beneficial The product here is called Uniprotein. They said it's like 70% protein by weight, the dry weight, 85% digestibility. I think it was 9% fats. Yeah. And then the protein amino acid composition was comparable to soy and fish.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:46

So basically complete.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 8:47

Yeah, a really highly digestible, complete protein. Seems like a really high quality protein source. So I'll be interested to see what happens when it comes out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 8:54

I'm interested to see what it tastes like. I assume they're going to make it flavorless, but... I don't know. Yeah. It looked like when I was reading the article, it's going to primarily go to animal feed right now. And then eventually it'll become like maybe sold for human food.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:10

Yeah, we'll see. Looking forward to seeing that come out. And more products like it. All this fermentation stuff, especially now we're talking about just plucking things out of the gas. I mean, it's pretty cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:18

Yeah, I think I saw one last year maybe that was talking about making butter from the air.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:25

Oh, wow.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:26

It's like plant-based butter from like greenhouse gases.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:29

That's really cool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 9:30

It's really cool. I think also just any greenhouse gases we can get out of the sky are a good thing. I know a lot of energy companies are looking into pulling carbon out of the sky or wherever and do this thing called carbon capture where they store it in underground caverns. But this is way cooler. Yeah, for sure.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 9:48

We can eat this. Yeah. All right. So now let's go ahead and get into the main segment and talk about why your fitness tracker might be misleading you on calories for a calorie deficit if you're trying to lose weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:00

And my fitness tracker, what do you mean? Like my fitness pal?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:04

The actual calorie burn estimates come from an activity tracker, like a wearable, like a smartwatch, or maybe even if your phone's in your pocket, it's counting steps, something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:12

Or like on the treadmill.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:13

Yeah, on the treadmill, you'll see when you get done, it'll kind of give you a number about how many calories it thinks you burned, some stuff like that. But the part that leads into it messing up your deficit is some of the food tracking apps like MyFitnessPal, Chronometer, things like that, will take in the calorie burn estimates from those devices and add those into your food diary. And when they do that, some of them add extra calories back to your day. So if your calorie goal was like 2,000 calories a day and then you went on a run and that was logged to your activity tracker and your activity tracker is hooked up to MyFitnessPal, say, it's going to add calories back to your log for how many it thinks you burned during that activity.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 10:55

Yeah. So if it thinks you burned 300 calories, now it's going to give you 2,300 calories to eat.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 10:59

Right. Exactly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:01

Yeah. I've had that happen on MyFitnessPal before.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:03

Yeah. I think on MyFitnessPal now it's on by default and you can't disable it unless you're on premium now.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:09

Oh, that's interesting. I've been on premium for a while.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:11

So I didn't know that. By interesting, you mean very annoying.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:13

That is very annoying. So I guess you'd have to look at that... that base number on the left side that like says how many calories you actually have consumed or.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:22

Whatever because when this is on in my fitness pal it shows you like a little math equation and it's like plus 300 calories for exercise or whatever or

Protein Deficient Vegan: 11:29

Disable the tracker from my fitness.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 11:30

Pal that's really the way you should get around it if you don't want to buy my fitness pal premium just turn off you know whatever integration it is that's feeding those those activities into your my fitness pal or do math yeah nobody wants to do that i do um yeah so the main problem here is that those calorie burn estimates are not accurate. So something on an activity tracker and especially something on the treadmill, it's going to give you a number, but that number is not really personalized to you. I mean, even in the case of like an Apple Watch, like that knows a lot about you, but those numbers just aren't really accurate for the purposes of tracking food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:04

Especially if you're trying to lose weight. Yeah, definitely. Specifically, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:08

Right. This is mainly only a problem in general if you're trying to lose weight. But on the other end, it could cause you to gain weight a little faster than you want. If you're trying to gain or if you're trying to maintain, it can cause you to gain a little bit of weight. Those aren't usually as annoying, I think. I think it's way more annoying when you're trying to lose weight and you're stalling out and you're not sure why. But this number getting added back to the food diary causes a lot of people to overcorrect, eat what it says, because, you know, it's like, oh, this app is made for this. Surely it's right. And then, you know, they're overcorrecting on their deficit and causing basically no progress. Another issue is that your activity trackers, a lot of them will report what they call gross calories burned instead of net calories burned. So it's tracking how many calories you would have burned in that period of time anyway, plus the calories you burned from the activity.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 12:54

Oh, yeah. No, that's kind of a problem because you're burning calories just sitting around all day. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 12:59

So if it says you went on a run and you burned 400 calories, it might only be 100 extra calories of that came from a run. Yeah. And then the other 300 you would have burned anyway.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:09

Came from breathing and other bodily functions. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 13:11

So if you go and eat those 400 calories, you really would have only should have only adjusted for 100 if you should have done anything at all. But you ate the whole 400. So I mean, it's just a lot of ways this can screw you up. And another issue with the calories getting added back to the food tracker is that the more you change your calorie target day to day, the harder it is to troubleshoot over time. Like what exactly is going wrong with the deficit? How do I need to adjust my calories to try to lose weight? Because if you're, you know, maintaining weight, when you're trying to lose weight, typically you would reduce your calories a little bit. But if, you know, your calories are like different every single day, where are we reducing calories from? I mean, usually it's like the base goal, but then, you know, if you're running a little more one day, whatever, it just like it starts to change that number a lot more than makes sense to try to track things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 13:58

Yeah. Especially if you're doing daily weigh-ins, you can't really tell like... Even if like you lost two pounds one day and then you gained three pounds the next day and then you lost 0.5 pounds the next day, like that's not really indicative of what you did the day before because weight kind of, you know, like you kind of really need to take a weekly average of those.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:15

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:16

So it would be really hard to pin down like where are we going awry here?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:20

Yeah, definitely.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:21

So how do you get around that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:22

So to try to address this, the first thing to think of is, is this an activity that you're doing on a regular basis? So if we're talking about cardio or running or something like that, is that something you're doing, you know, several times a week, every week? Or is this something you're doing like once every three or four weeks?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:39

Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 14:40

Yeah. If it's something that you're doing on a regular basis, you don't really need to do anything special because it will kind of show up in your weekly weigh-ins and you can adjust your normal daily calorie target to just adapt for what is happening.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 14:54

How okay so like let's say that i am trying to lose weight and i've decided to add in like, an hour and a half of cardio extra each week, how would I go figure out how many calories I should add in?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:08

You would do that cardio for a couple of weeks and see how it affects your weigh-ins. And then if it causes you to lose weight faster than you want, you might add back in 100 calories, 200 calories, and then go for another week or two and see how that affects your weigh-ins.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:22

Okay.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:23

As far as the activity being on a regular basis, if it's not on a regular basis, then it's probably not even worth adjusting anything for because you're not doing it often enough that it's going to mess with your deficit much at all. So if this is, I went out and played frisbee golf or something, and maybe I'll do it once every month, once every two months. Like, I just wouldn't adjust anything because you're going to have one day where you burn some extra calories, but in the end, that's not really going to be important enough that you need to like go and change your plan.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:48

Or you went on like an all day hike somewhere.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:51

Right, exactly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:51

For fun.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:52

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:53

On those days, I would just eat whatever the hell I wanted because I hiked for eight hours.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:56

Yeah. I think some people would probably.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 15:58

But that's just me.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 15:58

But even if you did that, that's not even and happening enough that it's going to throw you off.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:02

Right. It's like a once a month thing, right? Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:05

So no big deal. So I would say if you're doing it frequently, it's going to be worked into your normal adjusting your calorie situation, however you manage that personally. And if you're doing it kind of abnormally, it's not happening enough to matter. So either way, I don't think you really need to make special adjustments for this if you're just trying to stick to a deficit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 16:22

Okay. So let's throw out the scenario of, I am now part of a bike club and once a month we go do a five hour bike ride. Yeah. What do I do?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 16:32

I would say if you're doing that, I would just keep your normal calorie goals the same. Don't turn on this activity tracking stuff, anything like that. But on the day you go do the bike ride, just eat some extra calories. And, you know, that can be kind of whatever you feel like. With different sports, you have different ways of kind of doing carb loading and making sure, you know, you've got enough food in your system to actually finish the thing, whatever. Like, you just do that stuff on that day or the day before like you're supposed to, and then maybe you'll just be over on calories for that day, and that's fine.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:00

And you're probably not going to eat, like, 5,000 extra calories that day, so it likely wouldn't affect your monthly results, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:06

Right. And the extra food there is mostly just to, like, fuel the workout, make sure you recover properly, get your muscle glycogen restored and stuff like that. It's not really about trying to fix your deficit or anything. I would just do what it is you need to do on that day to complete the event that you're trying to do.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 17:24

Okay, but if you're doing... a six-hour bike ride once a week, then you would go look at that, right? You wouldn't just gorge yourself once a week?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 17:32

No, yeah. If you're doing a six-hour bike ride once a week, we'd probably set up some kind of plan where it's like, okay, overall, we're going to make your calories a little higher every day. And we might even plan, like you do this Friday every week, we might even plan for a day that has slightly higher calories. But that wouldn't be something that you're just arbitrarily changing day of. Because also with the bike ride thing, If you're trying to do it based on exercise calories that got added back to your food tracker, you wouldn't even know what that is until after the ride, which is like later in the day. Whereas maybe you'd want to eat that food earlier in the day before the ride. That's interesting.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:03

So what would a person do if they didn't have a personal trainer to address this?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:07

Yeah, I would say just eat a little more. There's not really going to be a number, I guess.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:14

On the day of?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:14

On the day of, yeah. Okay. Eat a little more in the morning, probably maybe like, I don't know, like 50% more, something like that. You kind of have to gauge it, like how hard is the thing going to be? You're going to know that better than anybody, really.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:25

Yeah, and if it's like a weekly thing, you can kind of look at the data after a few weeks and see if you are still losing the amount of weight you want, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:32

Yeah, definitely. I mean, if it's a regular thing and you're eating 2,000 calories a day and you start doing this thing regularly and you're like, okay, I'm losing weight way faster than I want, then you just bump up your calories every day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 18:43

Or I'm like exhausted on Saturday because of Friday.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 18:46

Exactly, yeah. Now, if it's like, oh, I'm not really recovering from this bike ride or it's like, oh, that was really hard. I didn't make it through. You just adjust like what you're eating day of eating, adjust what you're eating day of for the performance of the event, but then adjust your daily normal calorie totals to make sure your deficit's in the right place. And those are kind of independent things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:03

And I think for all of this, you really need to be tracking your food accurately for any of this conversation to matter, right? Like if you're eating like secret food that's not going into your MyFitnessPal, like there's going to be no way for you to figure out what your calories should actually be.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 19:18

Yeah, especially if I know a lot of people on a long run or a long bike ride, they'll be taking in carbs during that. So you also want to make sure that's being tracked. And a lot of the time, doing long distance type stuff like this on a regular basis is not super compatible with a long term deficit to try to lose weight. I mean, people do do this to try to lose weight. It's just you're going to have trouble recovering anyway. So this is just going to make recovery harder. But if it's just something, you know, you like to do or you want to do, then we can still adjust for it appropriately.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 19:49

Yeah, I remember one time you and I were part of a group and we did a six hour gym day. Yeah. Where we just basically did a marathon of, like, every machine in the gym. Yeah. And then.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:02

And then we did a hit circuit.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:03

And then we did a hit circuit. And then we, like, ate our weight in food because we were just, like, starving. But then the next day we just didn't even move. And then the next day we did it again. And, like, that is not a way to lose weight at all.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:16

Yeah. And that brings up a couple of the issues with trying to just kind of eat back the calories. And a couple of reasons why this can be difficult in general is But activity like this is going to make you hungrier and it's going to make you more likely to overeat. So if this is something you're doing all the time, you definitely got to be careful and track the calories and make sure. And it's also you'd only really want to adjust for something that's like really extensive and hard. This is not like I went for a 30 minute run this morning. That's not something we're adjusting anything for. Like we're not doing anything special.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 20:46

Unless you're doing it like every day and then you start seeing that you're like losing way more weight than you should.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 20:50

And then a couple of other issues with adding back calories are that your body is kind of already compensating by down-regulating is what they call it, but basically just like lowering your other activity in the day without you really noticing. So if you go on, like, a really long run or you just go on, like, a normal run or you add some extra cardio in throughout the week or something like that, your body, in some cases, in a lot of cases, will just kind of have you fidget less or, like, move around less, things you don't really notice.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:19

Because it's just trying to maintain or?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:21

Yeah, it's just compensating, trying to conserve energy. That's kind of what your body does. But this is a reason why adding activity does not always, like, directly increase a deficit. It's way more reliable to decrease the food intake because if you're saying like, okay, I'm going to add two extra cardio sessions this week, then you might not even notice it, but your body will kind of cancel some of that out by just like lowering your non-exercise activity subconsciously a lot of the time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 21:47

Yeah. This is why they say you can't like out-exercise a poor diet.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 21:50

Right? Right. Exactly. Yeah. And you'll see this and I've seen it with people I've trained and other people I know who've been in training. They're trying to increase their deficit. They start just like doing cardio more and that doesn't move the needle quite as much as you would expect. And that's for this kind of reason. But especially in a deficit, because if you're in a deficit, you're already going to have kind of down-regulated stuff. And it's just going to get worse as you add more activity.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:11

That's interesting. And then it'll make you hungry. And then you'll probably, you know.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:15

And it'll make you hungry and you're going to overeat more. I mean, you can control that a little bit by tracking. But, you know, I think everybody knows tracking doesn't actually put like a cap on how much food you put in. You're just like, oh, I ate too much today.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:26

I think that's why in general, like if you're starting a weight loss journey, it's probably good to do building blocks of like, let's start the deficit. Now let's add in activity. you know. Right. Kind of see where you end up.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:38

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:39

You don't want to do all of it at once and now you're starving and then you're overeating and then you end up like either not losing weight for a month or.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:45

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 22:45

Gaining weight.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 22:46

Yeah definitely. And then it's also true for like lifting or resistance training. That is something else that will show up on an activity tracker as calories burn but resistance training burns a lot less calories than you might expect it would for how hard it feels. Yeah. You know it's definitely burning less than a cardio session and it's in some cases it's not burning much at all because actually if you think about like lifting you're spending most of the time resting and your heart rate's like coming back down from the 10 seconds you spent doing the lift that's

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:12

True so and lifting makes me hangry.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:14

Yeah like

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:16

More hangry than cardio.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:17

Does yeah for sure is that like normal uh i don't i don't know physiologically but i have the same experience yeah

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:25

If i lift i'm really hungry if i do cardio not.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:28

So much yeah and

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:29

If i walk i'm not really hungry.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:30

At all yeah cardio mostly just makes me really thirsty Yeah,

Protein Deficient Vegan: 23:33

Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 23:33

Maybe sweat loss or something. Yeah. So the right way to adjust your expenditure that isn't adding these calories back through these activity trackers is just kind of like we were talking about, like you weigh yourself for a few weeks. You take your weekly average with this new activity that's hopefully a consistent activity. And then if you're losing weight too fast or not losing weight as fast as you want, you just adjust your calories. I like to do it by like one to 200 calories a day at a time.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:02

So it's not a huge adjustment.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:05

Let that go for a couple more weeks and say, OK, I'm about at the right right now. And you just kind of keep tweaking that dial until you're in the right spot. And that's a lot more that's a lot easier to adjust than daily fluctuating calories based on whatever activity you happen to do.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 24:18

Now, if anyone wanted to check to see if their like food tracking app was adding back in calories, how would you have them verify that it wasn't?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 24:28

Yeah. So there's a setting in all of them that you can check, but you should also just be able to see like in your log, it will show like activity added back. MyFitnessPal at least can be a little misleading because even when you have the setting turned off, the activity will show up in the log. Yeah. It just won't give you calories back for it. Um, but both chronometer and my fitness pal, um, have a setting in the settings where it's basically like had extra calories. So you just turn that off or check and see if it's on. Um, and then if you use macro factor, it doesn't even look for that kind of thing. So you don't have to worry about that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:01

And then if you're really wanting to verify it, I guess you could do the math.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:06

Yeah, I mean, if you know your calorie target is 2,000 for the day and you eat 2,000 calories and it's telling you you have 300 left, then this thing's turned on. Yeah. You can manually do the math that way and, like, adjust it yourself. Or if you just use an app like Macrofactor, I think there might be another one that does this, but Macrofactor is, I think, the best one for it, where you just give it, you know, your food every day, you give it your weight every day, and it automatically tracks your real-time expenditure. It doesn't use, like, activity burn estimates or whatever. It just tracks your actual real-life expenditure based on the other data.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:36

Oh, like your weight inputs and stuff?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 25:38

Yeah, your weight inputs. So basically, all you need to know to know your actual daily energy expenditure over time is your food intake and your weight. Like, that's going to tell you your daily expenditure because that's how the math works out.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 25:48

Okay, so if you were a person who didn't have the experience you have as a personal trainer and you didn't want to pay for a personal trainer... Which app would you use to like set your calories and everything?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:00

I would 100% use Macrofactor.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:01

Because it'll kind of eat calories and adjust all of it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:04

It is not free. That's the downside. Chronometer and MyFitnessPal both have a free version. Macrofactor does not have a free version. But I think the calorie expenditure calculation and it kind of like coaches your calories for you. I think that is worth. I mean, it's not expensive. I think it's like five, six dollars a month, maybe something like that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:22

Less than Netflix.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:23

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I think I would recommend that to pretty much anybody who doesn't have a really good reason to use a different app just because of that data that it gives you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:32

Yeah. Or like the knowledge to know how to make all those adjustments and keep a close eye on it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:36

And it's going to be really hard to argue with Macrofactor because it's going to tell you, like, this is exactly, if you're not losing weight, it's going to tell you this is exactly why. Like, you're burning this many calories a day and you're eating this many calories a day. That's why you're not losing weight. Yeah. It just makes it irrefutable, basically.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 26:51

Yeah. And it's like not to say that there might not be something wrong with your body, but like the calories out are less than the calories in. Right.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 26:58

For whatever. And there are, you know, that equation is simple, but there are a lot of reasons why you're not burning as many calories as you think you should be. Yeah. There are a lot of things that can play into that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:07

I mean, like I don't have a thyroid. Right. So mine can get really whacked out and I'll be like... gain 10 pounds over a couple months and be like what the what the hell i've been tracking everything and it's like oh my thyroid's out of whack because i don't have one just.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:20

Changing like medication which basically increases your expenditure

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:22

Oh yeah yeah no this is completely off topic but crazy but so basically that's what was happening is apparently my manufacturer had switched and it was like i guess less of a dosage than my other one even though it was the same dosage and I talked to my doctor and he's like, yeah, apparently like manufacturers, especially if they don't have like a lot of oversight in the U.S. or something like the even though they say a certain dosage, it could be like up to 20 percent off. And I'm like, oh, that's really cool.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 27:53

Yeah. So if you take levothyroxine and you notice something different with your deficit every time you get a new bottle of pills, you might look into this.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 27:59

Are they a different shape or color this month?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:02

Yeah. But no. Yeah. There's definitely a lot of things like hormones, like the thyroid, other hormones, your like general activity, what your work is, your day-to-day life, what a lot of that stuff.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:12

Stress.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:12

Stress. Sleep. A lot of these things will impact kind of the calories outside of that equation. But the, I mean, you can fix a lot of those things, but the answer is typically just eat fewer calories. Yeah. Until you figure that out. And then, you know, if you start eating fewer calories and then you figure some of that stuff out, if you're using macrofactor, your expenditure will adjust back up and it'll tell you, okay, you can eat more now. So we'll give you calories back just the same way they'll take them away.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 28:36

Okay. And if you don't want to use Macrofactor because you refuse to pay subscription fees, what would you recommend? You have a calculator on your site, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 28:44

Yeah, I have a TDEE calculator, which would give you a good starting estimate. And then from there, I would start with that estimate for whatever your goal is. And then I would say, you know, weigh in as much as you can every week. Take the average weight across each week, like once a week, maybe like every Saturday. You average up the past week and then compare every Saturday's average weight for a couple of weeks. And then if that's, if you're not losing weight as fast as you want, decrease your calories. If you're losing weight too fast, increase your calories.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:12

Only about like a one or 200, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:14

Yeah, like one or 200 a day. And then go two more weeks and repeat the process.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:18

Free advice for you. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:20

If you use an iPhone, there's an app called Happy Scale that will do the automatic averaging of your weight and just show you, like, the average weekly trend. Yeah. That'll make that a little easier. I don't think there's an Android version of that app specifically.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:32

But you could always start in a spreadsheet.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:34

Yeah. I mean, all it does is, like, you know, add up the days you waited that week and divide by. You know how an average works.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:41

I hope you know how an average works.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:43

If you don't, you can Google, how do I get an average of my weight for the week?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 29:46

Add the numbers and divide it by the number of numbers.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 29:48

There you go. And then just in general, the more consistent you are with your activity and your food intake, the more successful you'll be with, like, reaching your weight goal at the speed you want to reach it. The more things you're changing day to day, you get a lot more variables. It's way harder to track and figure out what should I change to change my goal.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:07

Yeah. I think, okay, this is just my opinion, right? Like, I guess it really depends on, like, what is your goal? If your goal is just, like, having fun and being active, none of this really matters, right?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:17

Yeah, yeah. This is, like, specifically for—I'm not losing weight as fast as I think I should be. It's, like, 95% of the use case for this conversation.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:23

Yeah, like, your main goal is weight loss, and you don't want to do anything to jeopardize your weight loss. That's what this advice is for.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 30:29

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So if you're like, even without the tracking and activity, even like missing normal workouts, like if you're like, oh, I miss like two or three of my workouts a week or like, but it's different every week. Like everything that's different each week makes this harder to consistently track.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 30:47

Yeah. And if you're doing like a six hour bike ride and it makes you so tired that you don't do your workout the next day, that's kind of a problem too, right? Like it could jeopardize like your weight loss goals in that way.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:01

Yeah. And that's a situation where you just need to decide what your priorities are. Like, and if you're like, okay, I really, I don't want to lose this bike ride, but I can't, I definitely can't do this workout the next day. Then you maybe move that workout to a different day or you just do one less workout a week or whatever. I mean, whatever your priorities are. And then your weight loss goal is kind of separate from that anyway. Like the activity helps, but, you know, for the reasons we've talked about here, it's not like the thing that's going to make you lose weight in most cases. right um so yeah you just you decide like these are the things i really want to do this is the stuff i enjoy the most and then we just you know plan your food intake stuff around that yeah

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:33

And honestly if you're able to do like a six hour bike ride maybe you don't have weight to lose i don't know yeah maybe you're healthy and happy.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:39

Maybe yeah sometimes

Protein Deficient Vegan: 31:41

It's more about what your body does i can say this look.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 31:44

You know your bike rides are gonna feel a lot better if you're not trying to lose weight because you're gonna be like on maintenance or even in the surplus you're gonna feel a lot more recovered and strong and stuff like that. So it's definitely a personal preference and priorities type conversation. It's really disappointing that these apps turn this on by default when they do. And I really think this feature shouldn't be in these apps at all to add the calories back from exercise because I've seen so many people talk about this on the internet about like basically how this thing is completely screwed up their weight loss for months because they like had this on and they didn't know about it. Like I've seen this for years and I've been telling people to turn the setting off for years. So yeah, I would just make sure you don't have that on.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 32:24

I don't even think it's just the apps. It's like it's also like the treadmill thing and the elliptical thing and like not even just those. It's like if you're using workout apps and stuff, they'll overestimate how many you burn to. They'll probably factor in like you just the breathing and the like organ function calorie burn. Right. But I think it's like it's to make you feel like you did more than you really did because it's all a lot of it comes down to like marketing. Right. You know, like, or like you see influencers that are like... do my 30-minute belly burner and burn 400 calories. And it's like, what? Yeah. I don't know about that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:04

Well, there was also active advice for a long time. They call this basically, so this whole thing, they call it eating back your calories and exercise. So there was like advice for a long time. It's like, okay, you burn 300 calories, eat back the 300 calories. Right. Well, I mean, the problem is that would work if you actually knew how many calories you burned. Yeah. But it's just not accurate enough. Right. And it can be off by like a lot.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:24

Yeah. We're, like, potentially really overestimating how many calories we burn. Right. And I think you also have to, like, factor in, like, the marketing perspective of, like, it looks better from, like, my workout plan if I say you burn a lot of calories. Right. Or, like, the elliptical looks better if it says you burn a lot of calories. You know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. Like, I don't want the treadmill that says I only burned 100 calories after walking on it for an hour.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 33:47

Yeah, I've been on some ellipticals where it's, like, I was on there for 20, 25 minutes and it says I burned 550 calories. Yes. That's not within the realm of reality.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 33:55

But I'm like, I gave you my height and weight. Why do you think this is wild?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:00

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:00

You know? Yeah. But like it makes you feel kind of good. You're like, wow, I'm so accomplished. I can definitely eat ice cream tonight.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:07

Exactly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:07

But it's like, it's mind fuckery. Don't fall for it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:10

Yeah, for sure. All right. Well, I think that's all I have to say on that for now. So now we can talk about our myth of the week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:19

What is that?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:20

Our myth of the week this week is that serving sizes matter or they have like a specific reason or they're important. You can think of it however you want.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:26

Ooh, I think I know that this is also marketing gimmicky stuff.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:30

Yeah, especially bad. I think. Especially in the U.S. Yeah, the U.S. is mostly the one that does kind of the serving size thing like this. a lot of other countries do like per 100 grams some of them do both where it's like we have per 100 grams but then we also have per like 25 grams yeah do you think that's about a serving I feel like I

Protein Deficient Vegan: 34:47

Saw that in Canada.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 34:47

Yeah so yeah serving sizes you know what's weird is I actually prefer our labels to the other non-US labels I've seen yeah yeah for a couple of reasons but the serving size thing specifically is like really not great yeah

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:04

I think I prefer it because I'm used to it yeah but I mean, I don't necessarily know that I would prefer it had I grown up elsewhere.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:12

Yeah. Well, I was looking at one from Europe a couple of weeks ago that you like literally couldn't figure out the protein information you needed from the label. Oh, that's a problem. Yeah. So that was, I don't know why they did it because I guess they have some rules where... There's a lot of flexibility in how the people are able to put information on the label. So sometimes it just doesn't give you the information that I would want on there because they chose not to put it on there. So that can get very confusing.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:37

Yeah. I wish all the rules were the same. Yeah. You know?

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 35:40

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 35:40

But what I have seen is, okay, I think it really depends on like how you're marketing a product or how the company is marketing a product. Because like, okay, let's take, for example, like the Hungry Man meals. Right. like they're gonna do a larger serving size because their target demographic is like large men who need lots of calories hearty food right yeah so it's like yeah that's gonna be like 700 calories right yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:06

Well what do you mean by serving size there do you mean more food yeah yeah because i think on a hungry man the serving size is one tray

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:12

Yeah exactly right but they do that on purpose yeah it's kind of my point yeah but then like a lean cuisine or something Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 36:19

Exactly.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 36:19

Like, that's going to be, like, 300 calories. But, like, potentially the macros could be the same. Like, your protein percentage could be the same. But another thing they really like to do is they like to mention how many grams of protein are you getting without the context of calories. Oh, yeah. So, like, the lean cuisine could be the same protein percentage as a hungry man meal. And then, like, you could just eat two lean cuisines. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I also see this with a lot of recipe creators will do this too, where they will like intentionally make their serving size larger to be like, this has 50 grams of protein. And I'm like, yeah, it's a thousand calories, Becky. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:01

And they'll do the problem. This is actually the problem with serving sizes. They'll do this both ways. Like they'll make the serving size bigger if they want to like focus on something like the protein. So it's like, oh, this has a lot of protein per serving. Please don't look at the calories. Please don't do that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:14

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:15

But then also they'll go the other direction and they'll make serving sizes smaller to make it look more like healthy or lean. Yeah. Like it'll be like, okay, yeah, this is only 100 calories. It's like, okay, but a normal person eats five servings of this.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:27

Exactly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 37:27

So.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 37:28

Yeah, it's – so I think –, My advice would be to look at the whole picture. Yeah. Like, you need to look at the calories in relation to the protein, if protein is a target that you have. But also look at, like, if you're worried about, like, how full will it keep me, look at what kind of food is it like. Is it, like, high water volume, so it's more of, like, a volume food? Yeah. You know, like, vegetables are going to give you, like, a bigger feeling of fullness because you're eating more. Right. You know, but what I've also seen on the flip side is like I've seen a few fitness influencers being like, don't eat that. It's only seven grams of protein. And it's like, OK, but it's 70 calories. So if you want more than seven grams of protein, eat more than one of them.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:14

Yeah. I've seen a lot of stuff like that where it's like if it's not if it doesn't have at least 20 grams of protein, it's bad. It's like 20 grams of protein in what? Like without calories, these numbers don't mean anything.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:23

Yeah. I think it's just another one of those things of like, my stuff's better than these people's stuff. Don't look at these people's stuff. You only want to trust me for information. But if they're not giving you all the information, you probably shouldn't trust them at all.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:37

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:37

That's just my opinion.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:38

Yeah. And then like the stuff like peanut butter. Yeah. There's a serving of peanut butter, super high calorie. But if you look at the label on peanut butter, it's like, okay, it's 180 calories or whatever for a serving. Right. And then you go and you like weigh out a serving of peanut butter. You're like, okay, well, this is like half a piece of bread of peanut butter.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 38:55

Right. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 38:57

I feel like... And that's the reason they did that, I think, is to make it look like there's less fat. Because they're like, there's only five grams of fat per serving. It's like, okay, but there's 20 grams of fat in how much peanut butter I put on a sandwich.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:07

Right. And I think you have that a lot with like, yeah, kind of specifically like the nut butters and stuff, where it's like nobody's actually using a serving of peanut butter.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:15

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:16

Sometimes I'll use a serving if I'm like dipping apples in it, but certainly not if I'm making a sandwich with it.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:20

Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:21

You know, but... Yeah, they do that shit on purpose. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 39:25

And then there's a lot of just kind of really arbitrary serving sizes with like chips and nuts and stuff. It's like a serving of chips is like 12 chips. It's like, what do we, where did that come from?

Protein Deficient Vegan: 39:36

Based on what? Right. Yeah, but I think the problem is because a serving has such like weight when you hear it, like you just assume like the company is like deciding what is a healthy amount of said food for you to eat. But it's. honestly it's usually based on nothing like if a chip company wants to sell you bags of chips that are only a hundred calories they're just gonna like weigh out what a hundred calories of chips are and it might be like 10 chips they're.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:02

So often way off from what if you just gave a person like the bag of chips or gave a person the peanut butter like what they would actually just naturally use is like nowhere near what a serving size is for right for a lot of these

Protein Deficient Vegan: 40:14

Products yeah it's like mostly marketing really like what are they trying to communicate yeah it's like i'm not gonna actually change the recipe of chips but i am gonna say this is a hundred calorie bag of chips yeah and i'm just gonna give you less and then i'm gonna sell it to you for more yeah and say it's like a low calorie snack yeah you know like it's all a bunch of marketing gimmicks so yeah i think like always we're always saying just like read the nutritional label and try to actually glean useful information from it yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 40:42

I mean a couple of things you look at are just like the protein to calorie ratio. And then when you actually go to use the product in the U.S., the serving size is kind of annoying, but it also right next to it does have how many grams per serving. So you can pretty easily weigh out, you know, the portion of food that you're going to use and then do the math on that to figure out how much you actually had. So, you know, compare the protein to the calories, actually weigh the food if you're tracking calories, actually weigh the food. And then, you know, because to make sure you're not getting too much, like the peanut butter, like, I know I keep going back to it, but that's the one.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:12

It's like, it really gets to you.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:13

You're going to weigh your peanut butter because you're going to end up screwing up your entire daily deficit with one swipe of a butter knife on the peanut butter. So, yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 41:23

Yeah. I think, like, the main takeaway here is that the companies aren't looking out for your best interest when they come up with a certain size. It's really more about how they're marketing their product. And I will say for me, like, when I'm coming up with a serving size for the recipes, it's pretty arbitrary as well. It's mostly based on, like, what do we eat for dinner? Yeah. I'm like, oh, I made this big batch of pasta. I think it's four servings because we ate it over two days. Yeah. You know? But I think yours.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 41:52

First of all, you have all the other information. You have the percentage of protein right there, so it's easy to see. And also, your serving sizes are same. Like you just said, this is four servings because this is how we ate it. It's not, you're not going to take, you're not going to take like one of your cheesecakes and make it 35 servings. Like that doesn't make any sense.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:11

Yeah. I was just trying to give context as like, as somebody who makes serving sizes for a living, like I just kind of arbitrarily decide based on how we eat them. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 42:20

And there are a lot of things that make sense for like a serving of pizza is a slice of pizza. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. A serving of chips being 10 chips doesn't make sense. Yeah. Or a serving of an impossible patty or something. One patty. Yeah, that makes sense. That's how people eat the food.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 42:34

Right. Well, also, like, okay, so if you make a recipe and you're like, man, this chick's serving sizes are way off. Don't know what she's thinking. Why would I eat that much food? You can just, like, multiply the serving calories and protein and all that jazz by the number of servings that I've said it is, right? And then just divide that by how many servings you're actually doing, and that'll give you your new calories per serving adjusted.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:01

You're definitely going to – it's going to be hard to avoid doing some math unless you just want to eat it the exact same way as whoever made the serving calculator made it. But it's more about, like you were saying, like the way that they do it in stores to be like just another little misleading marketing tool.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:15

Right, yeah. Yeah. Which it definitely is. Yeah, for sure.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:19

I'm glad they have the information. But you really have to be careful of the way it's presented.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:23

Yeah. I had –, I have a fresh mozzarella recipe, and, like, the whole thing is, like, it makes 10 servings, right? And I had some guy was, like, I don't think, because, like, a serving is, like, 50 calories. He's usually, like, I think this serving size is too small. And I'm, like, based on, like, what, though? Because you haven't made it. Yeah. Because it's, like, actually a lot. Yeah. And he's, like, how much does it weigh? And it's, like, I never do grams on mine. It really depends on, like, how you cook off water and, like, a lot of factors that.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 43:52

Yeah, this is not a packaged product.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 43:54

Yeah. It's too hard to put grams in serving sizes for recipes. Yeah. A lot of factors I can't control in your kitchen.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:00

Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:00

But I'm just like, it's like a serving size to me is like a large size of pizza. And like, I think this recipe covers 10 large slices of pizza. So like, that's a serving size. But also like, if you want to eat one and a half servings of it when you make it, you can do that. Yeah. You can do whatever you want.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:21

Yeah. And it's the same with chips. Like I can just eat 15 chips. Yeah. It's just a matter of like, you look at the label in the store and you're like, oh, these might be kind of like, they're not super unhealthy. And then you like, you look at, you look at the serving size in your hand and you're like, oh, I mean, I'm going to eat six servings.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:36

I get three bites for 700 calories. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So I think moral of the story is eat whatever serving size you want to eat and then just track it accordingly.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:48

Yeah, the serving status on the label is very arbitrary and should not be, like, the way you determine if it's, like, healthy, quote-unquote, or unhealthy.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 44:55

Yeah, look at all the other pieces of information.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 44:58

Yeah. All right. So I think that's it for this week. If you guys could rate and review our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, that really helps us out. You can also leave comments on Spotify and YouTube and like seeing those. And then also down in the show notes is our Deficient Vegans Discord server, where we have a lot of cool friends and talk about vegan things and fitness things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:19

Yeah, it's popping off pretty good these days.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:21

Yeah, so that's pretty cool. And then also in the show notes, you can see our websites, ProteinDeficientVegan.com, MuscleDeficientVegan.com. Find us on Instagram or any of the other social medias. If you want to reach out, ask questions, send an email or contact on the website.

Protein Deficient Vegan: 45:34

We will respond. Yeah.

Muscle Deficient Vegan: 45:35

Happy to talk. All right. Thanks for listening. You want to say bye? Bye, guys. Bye, everybody.