The Dangers of Chronic Calorie Deficits

Okay, you touched on your jiu-jitsu coaching, kind of the example you gave around probably globally amongst MMA fighters. But actually, let's even look out at the weight loss population and how people tend to just survive in a calorie deficit. So if we switch our focus to a weight loss scenario, it could be a fighter or it could just be someone trying to lose weight we like in my practice i often see people coming in and it seems as if when we look at their diet that they've been existing for a long time in a calorie deficit you know probably underneath there even without calculating their calorie need you can see that they're probably in a calorie deficit and when you do calculate it certainly backs that up but they're potentially not losing weight and potentially you know just they say that they're fine but objectively you could look at it and think they're probably not fine can you just think some of that about why you know being in a calorie deficit long periods of time maybe isn't the best thing for people yeah so i thought about that a lot that question that you had sent me and there's a few different scenarios that you see you have people that you know you have one like we'll go through a few different clients client a client a has no idea about food and calories they think they do because maybe they watch something on Oprah or whatever I don't know but they don't realize how many calories are actually in the food they're eating and they don realize they eating twice the amount of calories then they supposed to be eating you get that you get that client to that client that is very easy to manage You teach them about food you get them tracking for a small amount of time so that they can eyeball their food. And then they realize, shit, I'm actually eating 400 calories more than I thought. Or in some cases, double what they thought they were eating. Then you have on the extreme other side of that, you have people that have been in a very severe deficit for a long time we see this a lot in the physique industry where yeah I know girls that eat seven to nine hundred calories a day and they train like 24 hours a week right it's like how are you even surviving on that and and that's all they're doing they're surviving they're not actually you know they're losing their periods their hairs falling out their fingernails are getting brittle and breaking off like they're barely getting through the day you know they've got all these issues going on.