Post-Show Binging and Exit Strategies

the coaches that i mentor on this very topic that i work with and try to get like more psychological understanding of physiological responses i have them read the minnesota starvation experiment so they understand that fundamental concept like being dick skin lean your body is basically fighting every urge you to keep getting leaner like it is like you will eat until your fucking gastric system explodes if you let it that's why people have so many internal like they get so so many internal disorders or problems gastric issues they end happening like i'm going to see a coach about my gi because it's so fucked post-comp it is a fucking bottomless pit and the funny part is i'm not sure if you've seen this but i have found for a lot of clients even myself the minute you start it is it cannot be stopped it is like you have to be very introspectively aware to know like i'm not eating the satini here i'm eating for enjoyment but if i don't stop this it will keep going the system like it's almost like the signaling just amplifies gets worse and worse and worse and then all of a sudden you're throwing up yeah but if you like if you have to be prepared for like this is something i try to teach my coaches to give their clients is psychologically preparing them for what happens post-comp you're not going to satisfy that urge it'll take months to re-regulate that that systemization um exactly as you're describing here which i just cut off because i thought it was a great point is that um for that exact reason i have people try and read the minnesota starvation experiment and then also try to get them to read the Gulag Archipelago. Try to have them understand starvation and starvation as a torture. That's the thing. Basically, it's controlled starvation to get to the leanest levels. That's exactly what it is. And again, anything at that level is not necessarily healthy, but we're not looking at health. We're looking at winning a competition. I'm that type of person where if I get a little bit of carbohydrate, I can't stop. If I get a little bit of taste of sugar, I can't stop. the strategy I use with myself is I, I don't want to call it a cyclical keto, even though it becomes keto just because of the deficit. And I'm, I am showing ketones, but it's a, I use a protein leverage diet like five or six days of the week where it's three times body weight and protein and as little energy as I can get in from carbs and fats. And then I refeed over the weekend, but yeah, but in order to make that work, I have to have a massive deficit. Like I have to run on a 1500 calorie deficit. So every day in those five days, because I have to bank calories because the minute I have a bagel or a slice of pizza, I eat two pizzas or I eat 12 bagels and I can't stop. So my refeeds over the weekend are like maybe 24 to 36 hours only because I can knock out 1,500 grams of carbs in less than 12 hours because I can't stop myself. Yep. And this is such an important factor. Again, this is why I think the lecture we're trying to bring out, not to make this podcast about that, but it's just so – it's something that I wish more coaches understood, which I'm glad you brought up is the psychological stuff. So we cannot separate the psychosomatic relationship. People try to, they try to talk about like, just, just don't eat as much or just, you know, train harder. Just do this thing. Just do less heroin. Yeah. If it worked like that, fantastic. We wouldn't have all these, we wouldn't have any of these concerns. We wouldn't have jobs basically to be like train harder, eat less. Cool. I don't need a coach. The fact is the relationship between the brain and the body are so intertwined. It is systematic. It is a duality that has to exist in order for the brain to exist, the body exists, the body exists, the brain exists. You can have that separation And so when we have these things where it like a post binge and his coaches coaches it like oh just don eat or like i worked with that many girls where there show day plus one to two and the coaches drop them there is no post protocol post yeah no being there in the corner no exit strategy but the scarier part is there's no preparation for that back off like yeah you're trying to like one of the things that i start to really push is as you get closer to show day well most of the work's done we just need to guide you in now the refeed loading protocol see how you look de-stress declutter let the body relax it'll usually pick itself pretty well with those protocols i need to make sure you're mentally prepared for what happens afterwards a lot of the time it goes show day plus one see you later and then it's like well no one's told me about what the left in the grow enough no one's told me about appetite regulation i was talking about hormone regulation no one's told me about my aniridia no one's told me about any of these factors that go on in my body and now i'm left to binge and then all of a have this bodybuilding fault that's not bodybuilding you're a coach yeah and you weren't prepared for what is going to happen to your body you the second you start to get these food signals the second you start to especially when the goal is goal of show day and then you don't have a goal post comp you don't have process or performance goals outside of that it's just objectively the outcome is show day see you later there is nothing psychologically stopping you from the binge and there's everything driving you to the bench and then you get these completely lifestyles the physique's blown out body fat's gone again so four weeks time i get that client from another coach or someone else i have to diet them back down after four weeks because they've just been non-stop and any metabolic benefit they did have from insolene is gone because they just ate for you know four straight weeks and now they're back to being fatter than they were pre-comp and it's like well now i'm gonna diet you again after just doing six months of dieting i've got to re-diet you because you just it and there's no mental preparation for that or physiological preparation for that that people aren't comprehending as coaches your job isn't just show day plus stop it is getting that person out of that show it's no different than coaches that do off season reverse out of season for for any team sport you don't just go grand final see you later all right what are we doing in the off season to finish off the year and then how do we start preparing for what the year is to come 100 you see that even outside of the bodybuilding, just normal gen pop clients getting lean. Like they set a start date and they set an end date and they get really lean and the leanest they've ever been. And then there's no lead out. There's no exit strategy. It's like, okay, we need to figure out what we're going to do after this. And they need to be told during this process, like this is people are going to hear this and think I'm a monster. But I had a client that she was 102 kilos and a five foot four. so she was she's she was girthy right and and i was like we started training me four days a week at the iopc and we i started dieting her down and i just realized like just telling her to eat less food and giving a strategy that wasn't going to work so i put her on 900 calories basically put her on a protein leverage 900 calorie diet for 13 months straight and she was training like an animal she dropped down to like 62 62 kilos something like that and i wasn't going to keep her on it that long and some people listen to me going oh you can't put women on less than 1200 of course you can if her fucking if her lean body mass is like 36 kilos of course you can i'm not going to feed somebody for the other the rest of the 102 kilograms of fat um but she was doing totally fine totally fine and as she's getting closer to 60 i'm like all right we i have to start talking to her months in advance that we can't eat like this forever. We're going to start adding fruit, carbs, other stuff. We got to slowly bring you out of this. So I started that like 12 weeks in advance because I'm like, I want to bring you back up to say 15, 1600, see where we're at and try to see how much we can get away with the other direction before we have to pull it back down. But you have to start that psychological talk early, predict what's going to happen because you know what's going to happen, but they don't really understand. Say, okay, you're probably going to gain three kilos, three and a half. We're going to set that as our upper end. And if you hit that, we'll bring the calories a little bit back down and we'll start maintaining this 62 to 66 kilos or so. And it worked fantastically well. We got her up to like 1,600 to 1,800 calories and she maintained her weight. But a lot of coaches don't think to start early to let them know what they should expect when we stop the dieting process and we try to get them to some type of like baseline lifestyle position.