Hello Steemians! In this post we’re going to tackle a really awesome and very important life-changing topic and that is "how to rebuild your metabolism". This is something that I’ve been focusing on doing this past year which has resulted in dropping my set point from 188 lbs to 178 lbs. What that means is that I always had a hard time dropping weight without putting it back on with more extreme dietary protocols. When I took this new approach that I’m going to share with you, I’ve been able to lose fat, and keep it off. I’ve been able to go out more frequently and eat more of my favorite foods. I’ve been able to take more trips, blow my diet and still stay lean. I eat pasta and meatballs all the time, I love bagels and syrup, waffles and bacon and eggs for breakfast, and I don’t have like the traditional hardcore bodybuilding diet that you see in the magazines. It’s just not the way I want to live anymore. But to eat in the way that I do want to eat, I had to learn how to fix my metabolism. And I’ve discovered so much over this past year that I’m so excited to share with you.
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Before we get into the different things you need to do to improve your metabolism, we do have to establish the problem here and some of these problems are coming from the industry. The fitness industry that wants to sell you on the idea that you can fix everything with an app. They want you to believe that everything could just be fixed with the magic macro formula. Just thermodynamics. And you just have to math your way lean. It’s just a bunch of figuring out your BMR, your TEF (thermic effect of food), your TEE (thermic effective exercise), your needs, and then figuring those things out, and if you get those numbers right, you’ll be able to lose weight. And let me tell you something, yes, that works if you’re healthy and if you already have a healthy and supportive metabolism. I’m not denying the laws of thermodynamics. What I’m bringing to your attention is that this whole equation is based on the state of your hormones and your metabolism. We have to fix those things first before the math starts working out for your favor.
Does that make sense? Are we clear? Alright, so you’re probably reading this post for one or two reasons. Problem one, you’re experiencing is that you’re doing a ton of activity, you’re not eating a lot of food but you’re not losing fat. Problem two, you’re doing a lot of activity, you’re not eating a lot of food and you’re gaining fat. Two bad problems.
If you don’t have those problems, keep reading because I’ll help you to ensure you don’t experience those problems as well. So there’s a couple things here that are going to go into fixing this.
1. The first thing is a new outlook on fat loss
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We got to get away from the diet mentality. We have to stop following diets that have an end date, that imply a short-term event. What you need to embrace is a new outlook which is a dietary strategy. You need a strategy in place that has some strong principles built into it, and one of those principles is that slow equals fast when it comes to weight loss. Your body doesn’t want to lose fat. Your body is designed to maintain homeostasis. It’s got all these cool things built into it to hoard fat if you eat too little. And it’s got all these different hormones that are going to go off if you’re not eating to trigger hunger, which is going to get you back to homeostasis.
So we need to take a new approach and I want you to write this Scott Abel’s ableism. It’s really good, it’s worth memorizing and it’s a great approach to life too:
“To lose fat you need to coax the body. When you coax the body, the body responds. When you try and force fat loss, the body reacts negatively.”
So we need a focus on coaxing fat off the body, not forcing fat off the body. We want to go slow. We want to allow your body to surrender fat on its time schedule, not your time schedule. And that’s one of the problems with all these “before and after transformations” out there. They force people to get in shape, but then the person rebounds because it denies the rate your body wants to lose fat. So we have to take an approach and what some of you need to do is you can’t enter any more transformation contests, you can’t put any more deadlines on the calendar and you just have to say “I don’t care if this takes me one year or five years, I’m going to lose this fat, but I’m going to do it in a sustainable way”. This is what happened with me. It took a year to lose ten pounds and not that I couldn’t lose it faster but I wanted to keep it off this time. So basically I stopped trying to force fat loss.
2. Reverse Dieting
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Then I just have to stop the whole dieting and I had to go into what’s called reverse dieting. This is a phenomenal topic a lot of people have covered it but we’ll just do a quick explanation of it. Reverse dieting is when you bring your calories back up to maintenance in a slow and gradual way. So let's say my maintenance calories are between 2800 and 3000 per day. That is what I should be eating on a daily basis to maintain weight, but let’s say I’m consuming 2,000 calories and trying to lose weight, that means my metabolism is not optimized. So the first thing I need to do is start reintroducing calories. I might increase 200 calories every three weeks, this is literally like 50 grams of carbs, so it's a small amount of extra food per day and we do this gradually until we're back at maintenance level. And the whole goal here is very strategic, what we’re trying to do is optimize our workouts because the best way to lose fat is to burn it off. We don’t want to starve it off, we want to have the capacity to train in a way that allows us to do good quality workouts where you’re getting stronger, where you’re squeezing muscles, you’re burning calories during the workout and after the workout, so that we create that deficit through exercise.
You want to burn the fat off, you don’t want to starve the fat off. But the only way you can do that is if you can have a good quality workout. And guess what you need to have a good quality workout? Everybody’s favorites: carbohydrates. If you’re afraid of carbohydrates the reverse dieting would be a great step for you, because you’re going to reintroduce them gradually and that’s going to start fueling better quality workouts.
It is important to say that this is focused for weight lifting workouts, because we want to build muscle mass. If you are a lady, you too you need to add more muscle to your body so that you have a higher metabolic rate and you burn more calories throughout the course of the day. That’s why when you go on vacation with your lady friend who’s more muscular than you and got more muscle in her body, she can eat everything she wants at the buffet and she might actually get leaner. Her metabolism is so optimized, it just clears those excess calories.
3. Stop Doing Cardio
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One of the big things we need to do is eliminate fluff from our workout schedule and from life in general. So, what’s fluff in the gym? It’s cardio. All your cardio needs to go, I’m serious. I believe every male can get down to ten percent body fat with weight training and nutrition alone. If you can’t, you haven’t learned how to optimize your workouts.
We have to understand that cardio increases cortisol, and cortisol increases water retention. And too much activity period also increases stress, cortisol and water retention. This is actually quite fascinating because what happens is if you increase water retention too much, you’re going to think your diet is not working, because you may have lost a pound of fat on the scale but you gain 5 to 10 pounds of water weight. And now you’re like “damn, what happened?” So it what happens is you do more cardio, you get more stressed out about the process, you drop your calories even lower and then the cortisol skyrockets again and that makes the problem even worse.
The first thing we want to do is take a minimal approach to training. And this is hard for people, it’s like “man I’m doing a lot”, yeah but now you’re doing quality not quantity. So the first thing I do with the client that’s not losing weight, who’s under eating with a lot of activity, is we literally get rid of all the cardio, even the HIIT cardio. We will introduce it in time, but for now we got to get those cortisol levels down.
4. Refeed Meals
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Re feed meals get introduced in time. This is a big mistake that many people make. I see a lot of people that buy generic weight loss program that prescribes a cheat meal every Sunday. And I wonder, where do they get that?
You have to optimize your hormones and your metabolism first or else those cheat meals are going to set you back. I see people that are overweight, they’re introducing a cheat meal on Sunday, and I’m like “you’re 30 or 40 pounds overweight, you don’t need a cheat meal.” You don’t deserve a cheat meal until you get lean. Your body is not going to utilize it in the way a lean person will utilize them.
So here’s the kind of the process. Once we get our calories back up to maintenance and we stay there for a sufficient period of time, where now we’ve had a good period of time, this might be a couple months of hard training, we’ve gained some muscle mass. Then we might introduce what’s called a slight caloric deficit, not a severe one, a slight one. And now we’ve earned the right to start moving back in a direction where we can start losing fat, but it’s because we’ve optimized our hormones and metabolism. So we can now introduce what’s called refeeds, because when you go back into caloric deficit you’re still going to experience some of the same challenges. It’s natural for the metabolism to go down as you lose body weight, testosterone is going to go down as you get leaner, hunger will go up, cortisol will go up, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff happens as you get lean, that’s just a part of the game. And it’s all controlled by leptin.
5. We Need a Quality Weight Lifting Workout That Optimizes Muscle Mass
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So we need to go to the gym, maybe three, maybe five, probably no more than six times per week, and we need to focus on quality workouts. The workouts should be designed in a way that stimulate muscle and that don’t annihilate muscle. We need to get in, we need to get out, we need to ensure we’re recovering from our workouts, we need to ensure that our workouts are leaving us invigorated, because again if your workouts are too hardcore then you’re going to get skyrocket cortisol, triggering the problems I mentioned earlier.
So we have to take this counterintuitive approach, we have to actually maybe do less but focus on the quality of the workouts, longer rest periods, good quality contractions, etc. And this is a very challenging mindset for people who are ambitious to embrace, because they want to just go hard. And I get it, that’s awesome, I don’t want to take that away from you. However when we’re trying to get leaner and leaner we have to keep these things in mind: less is often more, quality not quantity, productivity not activity.
References
- Schwarzbein D. The Schwarzbein principle: the program: losing weight the healthy way: an easy, 5-step, no-nonsense approach. Deerfield Beach (FL): Health Communications; 2004.
- Major, et. al.Clinical significance of adaptive thermogenesis. International Journal of Obesity. 2007 Feb;31(2):204-12. PUBMED
- Muller, et. al. Adaptive thermogenesis with weight loss in humans. Obesity. Feb;21(2):218-228. PUBMED
- Rosenbaum, et. al. Long-term persistence of adaptive thermogenesis in subjects who have maintained a reduced body weight. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2008;88(4): 906-912. nutrition.org
- Camps, et. al. Weight loss, weight maintenance, and adaptive thermogenesis. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2013;97(5):990-994. PUBMED
- Winsier, et. al. Do adaptive changes in metabolic rate favor weight regain in weight-reduced individuals? An examination of the set-point theory. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 2000;72(5):1088-94. PUBMED
- Miller, et. al. Resistance to slimming: adaptation or illusion? Lancet. 1975;1(7910):773-775. PUBMED