**Nutrition Guide**

Friends, this nutrition guide was written specifically for you so we could understand together what’s essential, necessary, and what’s secondary or practically unimportant when creating a diet plan. **Energy balance and body weight.** Friends, changes in energy balance lead to weight changes. In turn, weight changes follow the law of energy conservation (the first law of thermodynamics), which simplifies to: energy doesn’t appear from nowhere and disappears nowhere. That is, the energy from food entering your body is either used for work or stored. We have several energy storage depots. The first is **glycogen**—stored from carbs—with muscles holding about **350g** and the liver about **150g**. Liver glycogen maintains blood glucose levels, while muscle glycogen fuels muscle contractions. **Fats** store as triglycerides in fat tissue. **Protein** isn’t stored in the body, though muscle tissue can be considered a protein depot. However, fats and carbs only accumulate as fat when there’s a **caloric surplus**. Simply put, after eating, the body stores energy—including subcutaneous fat. Between meals in fasting states, it draws from these sources. After eating again, storage resumes. If your body receives more energy in a day than it expends, fat increases. If not, fat decreases. In short, fat storage works like a **bank account balance**—daily deposits (energy intake) and withdrawals (energy use).