The Problem with Chronic Low-Calorie Dieting

And so, yeah, if you're eating a thousand calories and being honest with yourself and you're training a lot, you may very well be stuck losing body fat. It might be time to stop dieting for a good period of time and let your endocrinology start to catch back up and focus on creating calories out by increasing muscle mass and increasing mitochondrial content, increasing VO2 max, so then you can process your calories in a better way. And that's, I think, where a lot of people are missing the boat is, you know, they don't think about the tools they're using and what the outcome is. And that's what we teach in our program design course is if we look at the concept of specific adaptation to impose demand, if I want an organism to adapt in a certain specific manner, I have to give it a certain specific stimulus. So if I put people on really low calories, the body's going to maladapt by under-converting thyroid and over-converting reverse thyroid. You're going to stop making testosterone effectively. you're going to stop making estrogen and progesterone effectively uh you're you're gonna stop growing your hair stops growing your nails stop growing your skin gets dry and flaky you get all of these subclinical hypothyroid type of symptoms your body heat goes down we'll measure people's uh temperature we get girls that come in and their temperature is like in the low 35s and they're freezing cold all the time they haven't had a period in 10 years so when we tell them that you know you've got to stop your disordered eating you can't live on a thousand calories we have to crank that back up um it's it's hard for them to understand that sometimes you're going to have to take a couple of steps back and then move forward again so part of part of that least mode ideology is to reframe your paradigm on what you think you need to be doing so that you can heal and then you can go to specific physical preparedness type things like then going into high-protein blockers, then going into something more specific once your body can handle this training. Yeah, and like you said, I think when we're talking about that, you make sure to recognize there's a few different groups of people. You can't just, we always can't group people into the same one. So obviously beginners that are very out of shape, yes, they just lack consistency in some regard and maintain a calorie deficit over a long time. but the people you probably see more of a kind of the intermediate to the advanced to want to kill themselves want to drop their calories and really want to get that and then they're just stuck in a vicious cycle so even with that obviously we'll get people in that sign up and the pure beginner they say oh yeah I want to train every day put my program and obviously when they see the calendar it's probably two or three wait stays and then you're just like, well, can you just get some walking steps on other days? How do you go about someone that loves killing themselves and may be kind of, quote, unquote, addicted to exercise, they think they need to sweat a lot and kill themselves in the gym, how do you go about actually pulling that person back a little bit and saying, well, this is going to get you more results? Because it's a bit of a mindfuck for a lot of people, especially girls.