Welcome to Empowered Radio.

I am your host, Emma Montgomery, an online nutrition and fitness coach and creator of Shred with M.

Each week we'll talk all things nutrition, training, and mindset.

You'll be able to take my tips and strategies and apply what you learn to see results

with both your body and your mind.

So without further ado, let's jump into the episode.

What's up, guys?

Happy Friday.

Welcome back.

Today I have got an episode. Honestly, I never think about doing ones like these because I take for granted things that I know that I've known for so long that I think, you know, everybody else just knows that. And I've actually gotten a lot of questions about it when I would do like Instagram, like Q&A. And so I thought, you know what? I'm just going to do a little,

you know, short podcast and kind of go through each of these, but really just talking about

essentially nutrition, periodization, but talking

about dieting phases or, you know, cutting phases and then maintenance and surplus.

And, you know, when each of those would apply, how you can structure each of those throughout

your year, progress markers to look for, just kind of diving into each

to give you a better idea of what those would look like and how they would apply to you and when

they would apply. So without further ado, we're just going to jump in. So we'll just start with

the cutting phase because that one is usually the most popular and it seems like everyone's trying to diet.

So when you hear someone say cut, diet, I don't know, I'm trying to think of any other verbiage that would go there.

But cutting or dieting, it's essentially putting

yourself in a calorie deficit. So this would be when you are taking in fewer calories or

burning more calories than you are consuming. This can be through exercise or nutrition or

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