Metabolic Adaptation and Starvation Mode

if you were in a true calorie deficit, you would be dying. OK, because you've got people think about food as as your deficit, but it's not. If you take food away, you have food you've eaten before that you couldn't use before. you're going to tap into that until you can't tap into that effectively. And then you've got to get it exogenously. So that's what you're managing exogenous versus endogenous fuel, fuel substrates, fuel sources, right? If you were truly in a caloric deficit, you know, you'd have to be at a point where you don't have any more muscle to eat. You don't have any fat to eat. It'd be like, you know, getting out of, you know, getting a Nazi Germany when they found, you know, all the Jewish people in Auschwitz and some of the other camps, you look at them, there's just skin and bone, right? If they survived, nobody these days in a first world is going through that, right? So you're not going to starve to death, but with a compounded stress of living these days, you can push yourself to the point where it's not a starvation mode, but you can get to a point where your brain will desensitize your metabolic rate to the point where everything drops. And then when you go into your maintenance is so low now that anytime you go above that in a binge or like trying to go back to maintenance, your maintenance is not your maintenance anymore. Now your maintenance is a surplus. Right. So what we don't want to do is create that situation where your maintenance is fuck all because you haven't given your body enough food. And it's it's done its job by keeping you alive, by lowering the metabolic rate to accompany not a lot of food coming in and not being able to get it off your body. so um but it's very easy if you just take a long game approach and you say okay i only need to pull enough food out and do enough exercise to get the ball rolling if i have if you have a 15 to 20 deficit when you look at okay what's my bmr now i need to account for thermic effect and any at now i need to look all my exercise if i look at the total tdee if 15 to 20 deficit gets me moving towards that goal, 40% is not better. Not necessarily. It can be better for a short amount of time, but I still have to go back up because the longer I push and very low energy availability, the more prone I'm going to get for osteoporosis, low testosterone, low thyroid, low progesterone, low estrogen, low ability to store glycogen, injuries, thinking, sleep. Like, like I never have people come in and say, you know what? I would really love to get really lean and to lose my erection and have no interest in sex. And you know what? I really love for all my hair to start falling out. Um, like that's, and I'd love to get injuries and you know what? I sleep really well. I'd love you to fuck that up. No one's ever asked me to do all that shit for them, but that's exactly what we do when in an effort to get lean, which is a very, um, ego driven, you know, getting to the levels of leanness that people ask me to get them to it's a very ego-driven narcissistic thing there's nothing wrong with that absolutely but the the it's the way you get there that's the wrong thing like trying to rush it and wanting to be lean yesterday instead of saying well this is going to take 24 weeks or this is going to take 15 or this is going to take 48 like what's your fucking rush yeah 100 i should really really like that that analogy or when with the thing that you said there about people coming in and not saying that they want to lose all these. The main thing that I'm picking up now is more hormonal functions and stuff like that, that we can lose so quickly if we're really aggressive in this approach. And in terms of, again, just another scenario for you, that if we have pushed, again, we've been dieting for, let's say a prolonged period of time, let's say 12, 16, 20, 24 weeks, whatever it is. And we get to a stage where we're getting to a point of diminishing returns and we're starting to feel energy or performance or mood and stuff like that suffer from that do you run diet breaks at that stage or how would you again individualize and completely person specific but what would that kind of approach be at that stage of a dieting phase okay so what we do is we use the basic clinical soap model so so subjective objective assessment and protocol right so the first thing we do is we need to look at the symptoms how do you feel um