Physiological Red Flags During Dieting

it's insane to me that it's just generally accepted that when you lose fat, you're not going to be able to get a great boner and you're not going to have sex. Or if you're a girl, you're probably going to lose your period. Maybe you spot a little bit like that is not, those aren't really good physiological signs of progression. If you're losing your period, you're becoming pneumonorrheic, that is not a good sign. And it's completely unnecessary if you just play by a certain set of standards and, you know, don't take your energy availability to ridiculously low levels and an understanding what that actually means, right? So if you're losing your sex drive, that's not good. If your sleep's getting disrupted because you're dieting, that's not good. If your ability to recover from training is not great, that's still not good. If your desire to train and be compliant, that's not good either. And so if people would just look at it and say, okay, I need to lose, let's say I need to lose 20 kilos. All right. if i just say okay it's going to take me a year to lose that that's massively easier to sustain long term and do than to say i'm going to try to lose that in 12 weeks yeah right can you do it in 12 weeks yeah you can do that 12 weeks but can you maintain it after you're done or are you going to take 20 off and then put 22 back on which is the yo-yo that most people will do and after they've yo-yoed five six seven times it gets significantly harder to get it off and much easier to put it back on yeah and it's just that uh that want to get everything done just what's the word i'm trying to use it's uh um impatience you know just like just want and you know what i i've been much more than i am now the most impatient person in the world and when probably back in the day when i was doing dieting phases probably going way too fast way too quick and now that we can see and like you just said it's just taking a little bit more time and doing them in maybe more phase approach rather than just trying to rinse it off in that small week period. Yeah. But we've all done it because we didn't know any better, right? But I think there's enough information available now that people shouldn't be doing that anymore. It shouldn't be promoted to do it that way. It should be promoted to do it in a sustainable way and to make sure that you get it off in a way that's not going to promote an unhealthy way of doing it and doing it in a way that's going to promote health. Now, if you're massively overweight, your blood pressure is really high, resting heart rate is really high, and you're super overweight, I get it. Let's go fast because going faster is going to be way better to get some of your health metrics looking better. But once you get to kind of an average body fat percentage, an average weight, average BMI, there's no real inherent reason to rush this process other than that's just inherently what you want. But what you want isn't necessarily what you need, right? And so we have to be realistic about what people need. If I have a woman come in and she's 50% body fat, okay, I'm going to try to get her at least a 30% or below as fast as we can.

but your physiology changes at that point. And the faster you go, the more, the more you're going to be at exposure to creating some type of dysfunction, losing muscle mass, losing strength, losing sleep, fucking your guts up, fucking your mental health up. And I think that once you've dropped that big amount of weight, if you just, if you're just knocking off a half percent a week, every week, you're going to look a little bit better. And then for women, once you get close to like a true 22, 23%, you're looking really good. Most girls think they're 22, 23% when they're actually 33. Most dudes think they're 10% when they're actually like 20. So for a woman, if you can get close to that 23% mark, you already look vastly better than most other girls. If you just ship away a little bit every week, you look that much better. There's no real inherent reason to, to rush it at that point and for guys once you get close to 15 you pretty much got a four pack and a little bit you're starting to see the lower abs what's the rush to get the 10 percent right what's the you so you want vein in your veins in your abs okay cool but do you want it for a photo shooting and you blow up or would you like to get to the point where i can teach you how to sustain 10 percent year-round with minimal effort yeah 100 and and one thing actually just while it was on my mind there as well or when you just brought it up i think you said like 0.5 i like to run the kind of fat loss phases mainly at like 0.5 to 0.5 to 1 rate of loss of body weight would you kind of differ with that or would you be in any any zones or completely person dependent completely individualized i know but for the average person at an average body fat percentage where would you like to kind of see those numbers so i like if we're using if i don't have the ability to do body fat percentage measurements like uh i have uh i've got i've got a body metric ultrasound device i have i have calipers we use the navy body fat test especially for online people who can't get body fat done i've got a dexa available to me like we can get that and i think that's going to be the best way of doing it but if you don't have that available to you then body mass is probably the next best thing that is circumference measurements.