Today I'm dropping another bonus weird Q&A for you, so let's get right into it. Number one can you lose weight by eating negative calorie foods that require more energy to digest than they contain? Oh, and I used to buy into this so hard with the celery, the idea that there's a negative calorie food that takes more energy to burn it, to digest it, to process it, than they have calories right. So your body burns more calories than the calories that are in the food and boom, you can lose weight, lose fat. All that and the celery is one cucumber lettuce pretty much. Now you can throw almost any of the greens in there for that claim.

And yes, these foods are very low in calories. Yes, they are very high in fiber and water content. They have almost no calories, that is true. But the problem is the energy your body uses to digest them is minimal still compared to the calories they contain. It's always a percentage of that. The thermic effect of food they call it the TEF. This is the energy required for digestion Generally accounts for like five to 10% of your caloric intake. So the fewer calories that have to be processed and kind of separated out from these, the fewer, the lower the calories that it takes to process them. Did I say that right? Yeah, I think so. So eating the low calorie foods like this obviously are going to help you feel full. So eating the low calorie foods like this obviously are going to help you feel full. That's the real benefit. They're going to give you nutrients in many cases, and you won't be consuming many calories, and that is really what's helping you with fat loss. It's not that they cause you to burn more than you consume. Let's stop looking for the magic pill, folks.

But I've definitely heard this question, you know, uh, promulgated for many, many years and I used to believe it myself. Number two another. Okay, so today's questions really aren't that weird, to be honest, but they are common questions that still persist. That I now find weird, but that is in the lens of years and years of of shifting my perspective and learning about you know what, what actually works. So, number two can you shock your muscles into growing by changing your workout routine constantly or every week? Okay, huge, huge myth from the bodybuilding world that persisted for decades and I thought this was true for so many years. So if you add variety to your training, at best it keeps things interesting. Okay, maybe a little bit more fun in a way, subjectively, but it's definitely not an effective strategy for muscle growth period. Now we have to define what we mean by variety, because there is an approach to bodybuilding where you could potentially change up lifts every week and still get growth, but even then you're tending to go over a what they call a mesocycle or a larger cycle where you're coming back to those lifts over and over again anyway and your body is adapted to them.

But we are talking about random body split part programs. Usually it sounds like this hey, what does your training look like? Oh, on Monday I go and I do upper body day. And then I say oh, so every Monday you do roughly the same five or six movements for upper body. Oh, no, I just pick whatever I want to do that day.

That's the problem, because now you're frequently switching exercises, you never master proper form on anyone. You have no way of tracking your progress effectively, your neuromuscular adaptation doesn't kick in for any one lift. You get sore unnecessarily and you have no clue whether you're making progress or not until perhaps months later when you see a little bit of safe visual development, maybe Right. So the the reasonable suggestion here, if you do like variety is stick with the program for at least a few weeks, and by a few I mean like six weeks. Okay, maybe four, four is the minimum, but I like six weeks. Six weeks is not really that long and you can stick with the same lifts, and by same I mean whatever you did on Monday, do the next Monday. Whatever you're doing on Wednesday, do the next one. Not, you know, not every session is the same, but one week of programming gets replicated week after week for like six weeks, and you progress. You progress on your weight, you progress on your reps or even your sets, however it's programmed, and that is going to lead to the progressive overload, the adaptation and the growth that you're looking for. There's no such thing as muscle shock or muscle confusion period. There's nothing like that whatsoever.

All right, number three, last question of the day Does eating late at night cause you to gain more fat compared to eating the same meal earlier in the day? This is another one that's actually even less weird in that it's probably even more common that people think this like eating late is somehow a problem, or eating carbs late or whatever, and this is a misconception because, again, weight gain comes down to energy balance. I'm going to say that constantly until the day I die, because it is physics, it is thermodynamics. It is fact that when you consume more calories than you burn, that is how you gain weight. Period, regardless of when you eat, because your body's ability to digest and metabolize food doesn't drastically change after a certain hour.

The problem is, people who eat late at night might be more likely to be eating the high-calorie, low-nutrient-density foods or exceeding their calories that they've already hit, or interrupting their digestion in their sleep at night, and that all contributes to hormonal impacts, to extra cravings and ultimately to overconsumption, which leads to the weight gain. So, in other words, somebody who eats late at night may simply be consuming more calories overall than somebody who doesn't, for a variety of reasons. Period, all right, I hope you enjoyed today's Q&A, or weird Q&A. If you have a specific question that you consider weird or you want to make one up, I'm happy to entertain it on the show. Send me a text message. Look in the show notes there's a link that says send me a text message and I will give you a shout out if you'd like, or I'll keep it anonymous and we'll answer.