Metabolic accident: has this happened to you?
Metabolic collapse is a very common thing that happens to anyone trying to lose weight, including fitness competitors. It happens so often that it has become the norm and even accepted within the fitness industry. The truth is that it is not acceptable, “gurus” and “expert” trainers are ruining people’s lives and health for a trophy or a competition, or to lose a few kilos. Anyone can lose weight, but are you doing it in a healthy way? Are you endangering your health? Find out if this has happened to you or is happening to you, and how you can solve it and reverse its effects.
At some point, it has become the norm to diet in a certain way. It’s simple, eat fewer calories than you are burning and you will lose weight. This is true, however any good trainer will know that there are many other important factors besides the number of calories in vs. the amount of calories coming out. Your metabolic health is extremely important, especially for fat loss, I mean why wouldn’t you want to burn more fat without starving yourself and overloading on cardio? Essentially that is exactly what is happening, people are falling into this vicious cycle of losing a few pounds on a low calorie diet while doing 2 hours of cardio a day. Now to explain it more. Suppose these bikini babes are eating such a low calorie diet (1000 calories or so) and doing 2 hours of cardio a day and working out. Between the 2 hours of cardio and the workout they are probably burning over 1000 calories, and may see a drop in body weight at first and then level off. What is the first thing they would do? Drop more calories and do more cardio, and again now you’re eating 800 calories a day and doing 2.5 hours of cardio, then for a week you lose weight and then plateau once again. Do you see the trend here; you’re driving your metabolism right into the ground. If you’re following such a low-calorie diet and expending so many calories, there’s no reason you’re not actually losing body fat unless you’ve messed up your metabolism.
Now, on the other hand, why not work your metabolism to your advantage? Why not let your metabolism do the fat burning for you? Your BMR determines how many calories you burn while resting, the healthier your metabolism, the more calories you burn while resting. So why not use that to your advantage? Read that sentence a few more times to really settle in!
Here is a method to use. First of all, start your diet much earlier, DO NOT crash diet, like anything else in life, if you go too fast, you will crash. Just like landing a plane or driving a car, the slower you go, the safer you are. By adding a few more weeks to your diet, you allow yourself to consume more carbohydrates to begin with and gradually reduce them as needed. I generally recommend cutting carbs on a weekly basis if you need to. If you’re burning body fat, you don’t need to keep cutting it down or drastically decrease it. Let your metabolism do the work for you, the more intense your training sessions, the more intense your cardio, the higher your BMW will be, which means you will burn more calories at rest. It’s such a simple formula, if you have a healthy BMR of 1500 calories per day, and you do an intense 20-30 minute HIIT session, your calorie output from just rest and a short cardio session is 2000 calories or more. Now if you run your BMR on the floor at 300 calories. You would have to do 3-4 times the amount of cardio just to make up for the difference in your metabolism. Wow, did you get it? When you’re starving and cranking up cardio like crazy, sure you’re burning more calories in the gym, but outside the gym you’re expending significantly less. Now tell me again why you paid your trainer a huge sum of money to waste your time in the gym, make you feel like shit, damage your metabolism and your health.
The best part is that after a competition or a wedding, you won’t gain a ton of weight back when you start eating normal again if you did it the right way. This is because their metabolism is still revved up, even when they start eating normally, their body still burns a lot more calories than the guy or girl with the broken metabolism, therefore there is no depression and no rebound.
If you’re feeling tired, sluggish, or at the point where you’re doing 3 hours of cardio a day and literally eating nothing, my advice is to stop! No show, trophy, award or prize is worth your health. If this has happened to you, you can reverse it by gradually adding carbohydrates back into your diet. Don’t overload, instead slowly add carbs weekly, perhaps including 10-20g more carbs each week.
My final advice is to keep an open mind and question everything in life. Just because a trainer has a good track record and his clients win a lot of shows doesn’t mean he’s a good trainer or even a trainer you should work with. Put your health first, that’s what a trainer does, and that’s the difference between a trainer and a trainer. A trainer cares about you, your health and well-being, while a trainer just wants you to lose weight or win a show at any cost to your health.
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