Muscle weakness
Hello, I've been experiencing muscle weakness whenever I try to workout. I'm pretty consistent and rarely miss a workout. I train 4-5 days a week. 3 days are full body and 1-2 are small isolated days. I'm really good with my nutrition and take in good carbs, and protein. I did recently have blood work done and it showed lower than normal levels of calcium. I do take vitamin d3 and k2 from legion in the morning and magnesium at night before bed. I have fruits and veggies throughout the day. And I'm still very weak when I train.
Maintenance calories + genetics
Hey guys! My girlfriend is a biologist and the other day we were talking about the fact that it is so much harder for me to lose weight than most of my friends, gym buddies, etc. She brought up the topic of epigenetics, which in short is how your environment during the time you are in your mom's womb and the first years of your life greatly impact the way your body develops (processes nutrients, fights deseases, etc). One of the things that i told her is that my mom was extremely underfed while she was pregnant with me (both bc of not being able to keep food down and bc of the beauty standards in the 90's), also i grew up pretty low income so we couldn’t really afford snacks to have in between meals, I remember being staaaarving before lunch and dinner pretty often and sometimes going to bed with some hunger still. My girlfriend said that there is a huge chance that these two factors made my bmr be lower than usual bc my body was protecting itself against hunger. I know you have said multiple times that starvation mode is not a thing, and now a days i'm an active person lifting 4x week eating around 1850 cals but i wanted to hear your thoughts on this. Have you ever heard about something like this? Is my maintenance cals changeable through something like reverse diet?
Transitioning to not tracking food
I have been tracking food for a long time, and a bit obsessively at that so I have a general idea of the foods/calorie content I eat. I think it is mostly luck that I have managed to stay this lean for this long (small proud moment is that my DEXA said I was 15% body fat which I am pretty darn proud of) as I enjoy dining out, specifically fluffy biscuits with jam and butter are my kryptonite, and work the dinner out into my calorie budget so I can indulge at dinner. The only beneficial point to note is that I love working out so getting to the gym is easy. I am a bit worried about starting to not track my food and gaining weight/body fat. Do you have any recommendations for weaning off tracking food and learning to just appreciate eating without worrying as much about calories?