Have You Earned The Right To Diet?

Have you earned the right to diet?
This probably isn’t a question your typical trainer would ask you but I feel its an EXTREMELY IMPORTANT question to be asking my clients nowadays.
If you’re that person who constantly finds themselves trying to diet, trying to lose weight, is ALWAYS on a diet and just “can’t lose weight because of my genetics”, I have some surprising news for you in this article.
The answer to your dilemma, most likely, is that you need to STOP dieting over and over again. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result. If you’ve tried diet A to Z in the past, and none of them have worked you need to try something new and unconventional.
The Science of Metabolic Adaptations
The way I see it, our metabolisms can naturally slow down for three major common reasons.
- It declines as we age.
- As a result of losing muscle mass, which is somewhat age related (as in sarcopenia) but can also be due to an injury or illness.
- The MOST COMMON REASON is that people keep themselves in extreme caloric deficits for extended periods of time and then tend to yo-yo diet. In this horrid cycle, thyroid hormone and other essential hormones for metabolism are severely suppressed.
As you diet, your body slowly adapts to the new level of energy intake. Thyroid hormone is down-regulated, insulin sensitivity decreases, Resting Energy Expenditure (REE) gradually declines to a new, lower level and our metabolism’s become more efficient at running on fewer calories.
Think of this process as your metabolism becoming the newest version of fuel efficient car.
What we want our metabolisms to be like, is a gas-guzzling Hummer that can’t go very far on one tank of gas. In other words, we want our metabolism to be as metabolically INEFFICIENT as possible if our goal is fat loss and maintaining a lean physique year-round.
How do you fix this down-regulation of metabolism and boost it back up so that your body learns how to burn more energy and function on much higher calories?
Reverse Dieting
Reverse Dieting is a technique often used by physique competitors (like myself) who get very lean and then must slowly increase caloric intake back up to normal so that I don’t just gain all of my weight (and more) back in fat.
But many leading nutrition experts far smarter and more qualified on this subject than I, have looked at the data and determined it to be ridiculously beneficial for a wide variety of individuals. Not just physique competitors.
Luke, I get what you’re saying, but why the hell would I want to increase my caloric intake if my goal is fat loss?!?!
I understand your anxiety.
Let me paint a picture here for you. By now, we’ve seen enough fad diets to know that, in the end, weight loss only occurs when we eat fewer calories than we burn on a daily basis, which leaves us with these two options…
Option 1: Restrict Calories Even More to Beat the Plateau
Let’s say Sally’s maintenance calories are 1,500. She’s been eating 1,500 calories for months, even years, and every time she tries to lose weight she drops them even further down to 1,200 calories. (Because most nutrition experts recommend cutting calories by 250–500 calories per week for the equivalent of a 1–2lb weight loss per week).
She is now eating like a bird and has barely any energy to function, let alone workout hard and build muscle. She loses weight initially on this program until she physically can’t take how much it sucks anymore and decides to go back to eating normally.
Only to find, that once she increases back up to 1,500 calories, she gains all her weight back and more because her metabolism further down-regulated and is now running maintenance/survival mode at 1,300 calories.
Option 2: Reverse Diet First, Fat Loss Second
Let’s say Sally starts with those same 1,500 calories. She begins a demanding training program that has a combination of high-intensity weight training sessions and controlled amounts of cardio.
She slowly increases calories each week for six weeks. Let’s say about 100 calories per week. She may gain a small amount of weight but if she’s been training hard, some of that is definitely more muscle mass (which is a metabolically active tissue and burns calories).
Besides gaining more muscle, her metabolism also becomes more inefficient and now rests around 2,100 calories for her to maintain her weight.
Sally now has 2,100 calories to work with as she begins her fat loss phase instead of 1,500. A difference of 600 calories she can now use to diet! She also has increased strength and muscle mass from the six weeks of weight training she did.
She can now slowly drop calories back down to lose weight. But this time, Sally can lose weight at 1,850 calories instead of 1,200 calories! What’s more, she can slowly decrease again to 1,600 and be 500 calories less than her new maintenance and she is still eating MORE calories than she was before (that she used to eat to maintain her weight).
I honestly believe you can’t beat this approach to break out of a fat loss plateau. Sure it might take longer and may be a little scary at first, but I’ve seen it happen time and time again. You can get leaner, eating more, all thanks to boosting your metabolism.
How You Can Set-Up A Reverse Diet
You can certainly take a pen and a piece of paper and go through the trouble of calculating your own resting metabolism and mapping out your macronutrient increases week-by-week but there is a better way.
Avatar Nutrition.
Avatar Nutrition was created by a team of leading nutrition experts.
One of the Avatar team members, Dr. Layne Norton, a champion powerlifter and natural bodybuilder, also has his Ph.D. in nutrition and did his dissertation on protein types that best stimulate muscle protein synthesis (i.e. muscle building).
He’s also visited the Human Performance Lab, I currently work and study in daily as an exercise physiology student, at the University of Tampa many times, though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him face-to-face.
Avatar’s core belief surrounding nutrition is that of a flexible dieting approach and something that I advocate strongly. Instead of eliminating a food group or macronutrient or insisting that there is such thing as “clean calories,” Layne and the team at Avatar Nutrition have busted these myths and found, in my opinion, a perfect solution for self-coaching nutrition.
The subscription to Avatar is $9.99 per month, and you can cancel at any time. I have absolutely no affiliation with Avatar, I just really really believe in what it stands for and how it can help.
In fact, this is one of the “secret weapons” that I personally use to help keep my nutrition on point, as well recommend to my clients who are on my self-coaching ELITE Personalized Precision Fitness Plans.
With the subscription comes the self-coaching, online nutrition resource itself, as well as access to many other articles and resources included that I believe are beneficial for anyone, even health professionals and trainers like myself, to read.
In particular, some excellent articles include suggestions on how to get the most out of tracking your macros and calories while still eating out.
When you log on to Avatar Nutrition, you will enter your information and select the goal: REVERSE DIET.
You will then choose either a sub-goal or intensity of the reverse diet you want to embark on (i.e. conservative, standard, etc.) depending on how comfortable you feel with how fast you want to increase.
Then just track your macros and hit the numbers given to you by the system. It’s that easy.
Along the way, you will check-in weekly with weight and body fat percentage updates and the algorithm Avatar uses will adjust your macros and calories according to how your body is behaving in real time.
Break the Cycle Today
After reading this, ask yourself again, “self, have you earned the right to diet?”
If you have been in long-term caloric deficits for as long as you can remember, the resounding answer is, NO.
Start your reverse diet today and break the cycle of yo-yo dieting. It will give your metabolism that extra boost that will allow you to completely break the fat loss plateau when you have finally earned the right to diet once again.
Okay, so now you’ve discovered a new secret weapon for nutrition. But you are still lost on how to set up an efficient, periodized training program that adapts as you do, and a little push for accountability along the way might help…not a problem!
Check out my various 1:1 Online Coaching Packages and ELITE Personalized Precision Fitness Plans here: https://www.lukekfit.com/shop