RefleXion Studio

10/05/2026

🥔 A potato takes work. A bag of chips takes a free hand. 🍟

Processed food isn't poisonous.

Chopped garlic is processed.
So is cheese. So is yogurt.

Ultra-processed is the Tw***ie on the shelf.
Also not toxic.

It's a lot of low-nutrient energy in something small and tasty, and nothing about it slows you down.

Tw***ie is 280 calories.
The same amount for 2 lb of strawberries (290 calories full of nutrients and fiber). 👀
Eat 2 LB of strawberries in one sitting,
the sheer volume alone makes you feel full..

In a lab, 20 adults ate about 500 more calories a day on the ultra-processed menu.

Same calories, sugar, fat and fiber on paper.
Nobody told them to eat more.
They just didn't feel full from food that had a lot of energy in small packages.

Two slices of a 14" cheese pizza is about 570 calories (285 each).
That's over a quarter of a 2,000-calorie day, and we haven't opened the garlic bread. 🍕

Chronic high calories and chronic stress both lead toward fat gain.
Low sleep makes us more hungry overall.

More body fat is linked to inflammation and a system under strain.

And it feeds itself: fat gain, inflammation and insulin resistance make each other worse. 🔁

Whole foods fill you up with fiber, protein and bulk, and more fiber means more calories pass through unabsorbed.

It's hard to eat your way past them. Hard, not impossible. Nuts, oils, avocado.
Guacamole is not a loophole. 🥑
2 tbsp peanut butter.
Nothing wrong with it,
But it's easy to over eat and it's 190 calories in a standard two-tablespoon serving.
And we lick the spoon after.

I don't love the word "clean."
It makes everything else sound dirty.

I sell protein powder. It's processed.
Athletes with big energy needs sometimes need processed food, because whole foods fill them up before they've eaten enough.

So no, I won't tell you it's the enemy.

For fat loss: mostly minimally processed foods, eaten slowly.

Enjoy other foods with awareness and savor them.

What's your bag of chips? 👇🏻

10/04/2026

Part 2 of 2: Burning fat is not losing fat.

Part 1 was the fat-burning zone. This is the other half.

Say you burn 300 calories on a walk, then eat 400. You burned fat, and you still ended the day 100 calories up.

Burning it means your body uses it for energy.
Losing it means your stores end up smaller.
It is a budget, not a purity test of food.

Think of body fat as a woodpile.
Burn from it all day, refill it every night, and it never gets smaller.
Pretty epic survival instinct!

You never know when wood might become scarce or if you break your leg and cannot refill it.
Survive off what you stored up on the good days!

So:
Energy in minus energy out equals the change in your body stores.

Burn more than you eat and the pile shrinks.
Eat more than you burn and it grows.

A deficit, kept up over time, is what loses weight, not "clean eating."

Avocados, almonds, and whole grains are good food, and they are calorie-dense.

Eat more than you burn and they get stored like anything else.

Milkshakes and carrot sticks still have calories.

Food quality still matters for how full you feel and how you feel overall.
It just does not override the math.

Calories are just a measurement, like kilometers.

If I drive too many kilometers on not enough gas,
I ran out of gas.

In our body:
Move more than the energy I have,
I burn fat stores to make up for the extra distance.

Keto is the clearest example.

It burns a lot of fat because, with carbs low,
fat becomes the main fuel.
Fine as a tool short term or health reasons.

But they lose weight because they end up eating less. More protein keeps them full, the menu gets shorter, liquid calories disappear, and ketones seem to dampen appetite.
Eat the calories back and the fat burning does not save you.

And if you never learned to manage food, stress, and the environment & you cannot maintain "being keto" for 60 more years.

We gained weight back because we did not learn:
- The skills of calories.
- Set our environment up to support us,
- Find friends who love us as we are and support us where we are going.

Your results are not diet-dependent.
They are behavior-dependent.

10/02/2026

🚶🏻‍♂️🔥 The fat-burning zone isn't a myth. The marketing around it is.

Walking burns a bigger share of fat than running.
Running still burns more fat. 🏃🏻💨

Share isn't total.

Example, with round numbers: an hour of walking burns 200 calories, half from fat, so 100.
An hour of running burns 600, a third from fat, so 200.

Why? Carbs are the kindling. They light fast, but you only carry about 2,000 calories of them, because carbs need water to store.

Every gram of glycogen binds 3–4 g of water so that you can feel "full" or "puffy"—nothing bad about it; just the mechanism.

Fat is the logs. Slow, steady, and you carry tens to hundreds of thousands of calories of it.

Hard effort needs fast, so it leans on kindling. 🔥

Carbs during. Fat after. 🔁

After hard work, your burn can stay elevated for hours, mostly from fat.

Long, easy sessions burn more while they're happening, because they last longer.
Both help. Easy work isn't useless; it's just not the loophole the treadmill display suggests.

Your highest fat-burning percentage happens while you're asleep. 😴

Nobody sells that as a workout.

Part 2: Burning fat isn't losing fat. 👀

10/02/2026

🚶🏻‍♂️🔥 The fat-burning zone isn't a myth. The marketing around it is.

Walking burns a bigger share of fat than running.
Running still burns more fat. 🏃🏻💨

Share isn't total.

Example, with round numbers: an hour of walking burns 200 calories, half from fat, so 100. An hour of running burns 600, a third from fat, so 200.

Why? Carbs are the kindling. They light fast, but you carry only about 2,000 calories of them because carbs need water to store.

Every gram of glycogen binds 3–4 g of water so that you may feel "full" or puffy after high carb/salt meals. Not a bad thing, just the mechanism.

Fat is the logs. Slow, steady, and you carry tens to hundreds of thousands of calories of it.

Hard effort needs fast energy, so it leans on kindling. 🔥

Carbs during. Fat after. 🔁

After hard work, your burn can stay elevated for hours, mostly from fat.

Long, easy sessions burn more while they're happening, because they last longer.
Both help. Easy work isn't useless; it's just not the loophole the treadmill display suggests.

Your highest fat-burning percentage happens while you're asleep. 😴

Nobody sells that as a workout.

Part 2: Burning fat isn't losing fat. 👀

10/01/2026

BIDWB: What are EAA's? 🤔

🥩📦 Nine essential amino acids (EAAs) your body can't make enough of.
They come by delivery: your plate or your shaker.

Protein isn't just muscle.
These get used for a lot of other jobs too.

Leucine is the foreman who says "start building." 👷🏻
The other eight are the bricks. 🧱
A foreman with no bricks is a guy with a clipboard.

Muscle building tops out around 10 g of EAAs a meal, about 20–40 g of real food protein.

Eat 200 g of protein and nothing is wasted.
The extra goes to other jobs.
It just doesn't build more muscle at that meal. 🍽️
It's really about thinking of it as the whole picture:

24 hour & 7 days a week and weight lifting stimuli as the driver anyway.

But, you can't catch up on Sunday.
Amino acids don't do layaway. 🗓️
You need to give the body what it needs to repair being alive, daily.

Eat a variety of protein foods consistently and you don't need an EAA supplement.
Food is the plan, but plans might need support so supplements help.

Who gets short deliveries?

🔥 Dieting: calories drop, the protein bill doesn't get a discount. 0.73–1.0 g per lb a day (150 lb = about 110–150 g). Food first. If you're short by evening, a drink closes the gap for very few calories.

💉 Ozempic-type drugs: appetite drops and protein is the first thing off the plate. Up to 20–40% of the weight lost can be lean mass. Lifting plus roughly 0.55–0.75 g per lb a day can substantially protect it. A meal can feel impossible at times. A drink is easier to finish. Ask your prescriber or pharmacist first.

👴🏻👵🏻 Older: the same meal builds less muscle than it did at 25, and you digest protein less well. Your body didn't quit, it needs a bigger order. Protein at every meal, not saved for dinner.

🏋🏻‍♂️ Hard training: that's stress, and under stress your body can't always make some of them fast enough. Protein at every meal, plus a shaker in the gym bag for the gap between sessions. 🎒

My ranking: whole food, powder, EAAs, BCAAs, nothing.

I sell supplements, and the chicken still wins. 🍗

EAAs are for the days the chicken doesn't make it.

Which one are you? 👇🏻

10/01/2026

🥕🍖Nutrition arguments online are usually identity fights with a macronutrient attached.🍪🥔

Your body doesn't know which camp you joined.
It responds to the stimulus and the fuel you give it.

Easy effort leans on fat. 🚶🏻
Hard, explosive effort runs on carbs. 🏃🏻💨

Your brain prefers glucose and keeps ketones on standby for when carbs run short.

Fat and ketone adaptation make you flexible.
Flexible isn't the same as faster.

Humans got through ice ages on whatever was available.
That's a better résumé than most diet books. 🫈

Most athletes, most of the time, perform best on moderate to high carbs.

That will disappoint the keto crowd and the carb crowd in roughly equal measure.

I sell supplements, and none of them fix a mismatch between your fuel and your job.

This is the first of a few posts on the same idea: biology answers to evidence, not belief.

Coming up! 👀 👇🏻

1: The fat-burning zone. It's real. It burns a bigger share of its calories as fat and less total fat than working harder. The time you burn the biggest share is sleeping, which nobody sells as a workout.

2: People vary. Two similar clients' resting burn differed by over 600 calories a day. Your calculator is a starting guess. Why?

3: "Damaged" metabolism. Nothing is broken. After weight loss the body defends its weight, and energy out runs about 5–10% lower than your size predicts.

So remember:

The engine and the bus. 🚎
Your metabolism is the engine. ⚙️
Your habits are driving. 🛣️
Your awareness and consistency is what gets you there safely and repeatedly. 🧠

Pick the job first. Then match the inputs.

09/30/2026

09/29/2026

🫩Being slow, moody, and always tired usually isn't a motivation problem; it's a fuel problem.😫😮‍💨

When food (calorie) intake doesn't cover growth plus training, the body starts cutting costs:
Energy, hormones, and bone repair.

🆘That's RED-S:
Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport.

It can show up at any body size, in any sport, at any level.

The brain is trying to survive an environment, not perform a sport.

And our eating behaviors are a signal of either consistent energy availability or not in our environment.

When it's not consistently meeting the demand, our body turns to conserving energy and output hoping we will go to a new environment with more food or survive long enough for food to come our way.

Think about it like hibernation.
It will not waste our resources on "extra" activity.

So unless you wanna perform like a hibernating bear 🐻 💤 👇🏻

Four things that move the needle:
Eat 3 to 5 times a day, breakfast included.
Carbs before and after practice.
Treat eating as part of training.
Talk about food as fuel, never body size.

And if periods stop for three months or more, weight drops unplanned, a stress fracture shows up, or eating starts turning into rules, that's a doctor, not a new meal plan.

The goal isn't a leaner kid. It's one still training in ten years who still likes food.

Follow for more Ian McKay | Strength & Health Coach

Do you eat enough for your output everyday?