Chronic Dieting and Metabolic Maladaptation

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 than they supposed to be eating You get that client too That client too that client that client 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 you know eating then you have on the extreme other side of that you have uh you have people that are 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 900 calories a day, and they train like 24 hours a week, right? It's like, how are you even surviving on that? And that's all they're doing. They're surviving. They're not actually, you know, they're losing their periods, their hair's 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. And so in that case, a lot of those people need to understand like being in a long-term calorie deficit like that is eventually going to lead to something called reds which is relative energy deficiency syndrome where if i don't have enough calories to support everything my body needs biologically it's going to get rid of the things that um that it doesn't actually need to survive like what do you need to survive my brain my heart my kidneys my liver like all those vital organs still need to be able to operate your ovaries don't need to operate well your balls don't need to operate well right like yeah so like it i i'd like to talk about it like um like a car right if you're driving your car and you're you're running out of gas and you're five kilometers away from the nearest petrol station what's the fit and it's hot outside it's 40 degrees celsius outside what's the first thing you're going to turn off to try to save gas you don't have to push your car maybe the air con you can turn off the air con you're going to roll the windows down and suffer you're probably going to turn the radio off too like you're going to turn off anything that you don't need because you don't want to have to push that car the rest of the way so that's kind of what your body does as well if it's running low on energy it's just going to turn off the air conditioner it's going to turn off the radio it's going to turn off anything it doesn't need so it can actually make it to the next meal so you can get into situations where people have been chronically dieting for a long time or and or they're not eating enough for the activity that they're doing and so they get this metabolic maladaptation where things start to slow down or their body just eliminates things for a small period of time kind of puts them in hibernation until you actually make that deficit back up and you see it a lot like people people when they when january comes around what's everybody do i'm going to go to the gym this is my year 20 years in a row 20th time this is my year to get in shape and lose all this flap they jump into the gym and they start thrashing themselves and they go on like a 1200 to 1500 calorie diet and they don't realize that that calories in calories out model their calories out is so high that they really when you do the math they don't have enough energy coming in to support basic life systems so their body starts shutting things down in order to just get buy, right? So in a lot of cases, those chronic dieters need to massively increase their calories, at least close to maintenance. So typically what we'll do is when we have somebody that's been chronically dieting like that, we'll take them to almost maintenance less, maybe 10% calories. And that's usually a lot more, 800, 900, sometimes 1200 calories more than they've been eating. Now, all of a sudden, thermogenesis gets upregulated. They're not freezing cold all the time, all of a sudden they get the period back, they can get a solid boner and now they want to have sex. So that's great. They're sleeping better. Their guts aren't dysfunctional, but it's a really hard sell to someone who's been chronically dieting that, listen, you're going to have to eat more for a small amount of time. And you're probably going to have to gain a little weight initially before we can start dieting again. Right. Um, I, I don't have a problem with long-term dieting or long continuous dieting as long as the deficit is only small enough to chip away at body fat right but that's not what people do people will they'll they'll write a diet and they'll be eating you know 60 of what they need to be eating um and then they do that for months and months and months and months whereas they might they might only need to just pull 15 of their calories out and they could do that for a long period of time