Metabolic Adaptation and the Rebuild Process

you're right look when you you get to this long-term yo-yo dieting um especially people who do a lot of photo shoots in the contest prep eventually you run out of wiggle room and if you're sitting in in the triple digit club or close and you're sitting around a thousand calories 1100 calories and you're doing a ton of exercise just to keep the weight from piling on there's going to be at a there's going to be a point where your maintenance is so low your body is accommodated to that, you could try to go lower, but what's the point? Like you're always got to run out of space. So like when you came on, I said, man, we've got to pump your calories up. We have to pump your calories up and it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And you just, this is just what you've done to yourself. And, you know, I don't make the rules for physiology, the universe does. And, you know, there was this, that long battle of like, man, I really would like to get you closer, like 1800, maybe in 2100 calories and just deal with putting on a little bit of stored energy for a little bit of time. Let's work on growing some muscle and then create a new maintenance and then take it back down. Cause you, you could have lost more weight if we had taken you down even more calories, but you know, what's the, what's the repercussion of that? You know, you're, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul and eventually Peter runs out of money and Paul has nobody to steal money from anymore. And at that point, you feel like shit. You don't have a period, your hair is falling out. You're cold all the time, cold hands and feet. Sleep sucks. Gut sucks. Building muscles sucks. And then you just get to a point where you, you're pretty much fat loss resistant. Your body's trying to hold onto this. And some people will call this starvation mode. I think I don't mind calling it that whatever, but you know, for me, There's a lot of things that people rally against as a matter of semantics, but we can look at it as a body protection mechanism where the body's like, okay, I don't have enough energy to run all these vital organs. So I'm just going to triage everything that I have from everything else and just push it into this. And when you get to that point, it's like you're spinning your wheels all the time. So the only thing you really can do, you've got those two choices. you can keep starving yourself more, or you can say, well, I'm going to go into a maintenance phase, kind of a growth phase, try to put on some muscle, try to get my hormones back up, and then start over again. And man, that took us a long time. Like, yeah, God bless Shane and Shane O'Leary, because he dealt with you for a very long time. And it was like, just a roller coaster of okay, we're doing good. Oh, Ali got crazy today. And I'm like, it's okay, I'll talk to her real quick. And, you know, he's, he's the best person I know for talking women off the crazy train. And so, you know, he, he did a lot of that rebuild over the years with me, just kind of, kind of coaching on that side, but him doing a lot of communication. And then when it was time to pull the hammer for the wedding, I'm like, all right, let's do this. And I'm going to get you real fucking lean because you had to do all that. You had to do all that back work to get the calories up high enough and maintain that high enough for a long time. And it was rough because you have to accept that your body's probably going to go through a transition period where it looks worse and you feel worse. Um, like some things feel better, you know, your body heat comes back, you're sleeping a little bit better. You can train harder, but then the problem is every time you make the mistake of looking at yourself in the mirror, you're like, Oh man, I do not, this is not what I'm what I signed up for. And it's like, that's cool. You got it. You got to kind of grind through that and then keep that weight maintained Okay Now we can create a deficit but let create a smaller deficit and start chipping away at it I think I gained like one kilo which is 2.2 pounds and freak the fuck out. I was like, this isn't working. Oh my God. And, and I'm totally like, I'm not going to be that person. And then I was like, oh my gosh, like, this is like how my clients are. And like, I understand, you know, the frustration of thinking that way. But when you have nowhere else to go, I'm like, I have nowhere else to go, Ali. Like you have to stick with this. How often do people come to you where they need to gain weight before they can lose again, but they're not necessarily ready to understand that?