METABOLIC RATE & REVERSE DIETING
If you rarely get hungry & have been living on low calorie diets for as long as you can remember there is a possibility that metabolic rate is not operating as ideally as possible. I often get clients coming to me complaining of never getting hungry & only eating minimal amounts of nutrition.
Often a history of under eating, skipping meals & over exercsing has led to a natural down regualtion of metabolic rate & thyroid hormones.
In this situation it does not matter how many more meals you skip or gym sessions you do, until you start to revere these natural negative adaptations to the metabolic rate fat loss, vitality, recoverability & training performance will all be well below ideal – this is very common!
We don’t need to go get any special tests or blood work done to know metabolic rate isn’t optimal if we are not getting hungry & have no appetite.
So many people, especially females hire me because they are caught in this situation.
Luckily the body is so dynamic with everything that you eat & do so it’s completely reversible, just as metabolic rate drops with low calories it will upregulate again with slight strategic increases in calories.
This is called Reverse Dieting.
The goal of a reverse diet is to slowly increase energy in “without” putting on any scale weight.
I often take clients first through a reverse diet before targeting a fat loss phase.
Through this process calories in will rise slowly from as low as 1000 per day to often nearly double that wihout gaining scale weight over a 8+ week phase.
Then the client is once again ready to drop body fat.
If you have been under eating for years don’t expect your metabolism to just bounce back in a couple of weeks, you will know when things are starting to improve because your hunger hormone, ghrelin will start sending signals again & apetite will improve.
SLOW & STEADY wins the race though, often I have clients only increasing 50-75 calories every 10-14 days.
In this case the scales are the best way to track progress, until you maintain a new energy increase for at least a week maintain that set point.
Eating more sounds backwards, but when metabolic rate has slowed to a point of “know where to go” a rebuild phase is completely necessary.
Improvement in vitality, digestion, sleep, cognition, wellbeing & training performance are all included in this approach.
When we under eat for long periods of time it is quite the stress to the system so as we slowly increase calories strategically it feels like the power has been plugged back in.
If you would like help putting a plan together contact LIVE FIT & we can go from there with it.
Graham
0417 446 531