Part 1: Moving Back to Maintenance

‘Metabolic Damage’ sounds scary right?

As we diet down something unavoidable happens, our human biology changes. Our metabolism adapts, it has to and it is something people often forget. This is because our bodies are smart, they want to protect against ‘starvation’, so we experience changes to bring our metabolism lower.

You might want to achieve low body fat levels but your body doesn’t care for vanity, it strives to survive and will do it’s best to prevent a loss in weight. You will experience more hunger, you will get lazy and have lower energy and reduce your energy expenditure, each will be more intense the larger your calorie deficit. The changes are expected, and it is understanding these that’s most important.

So lets take an example, me. I started my fat loss journey on over 3500 calories, my metabolism was high, I had loads of energy and my hormones were functioning well. The weight dropped off, but after a few weeks the weight loss stalled, my metabolism had adapted down. This meant the calorie intake I once lost fat on was now enough to maintain my weight, bummer. So I either needed to drop my calorie intake further or increase my expenditure, that’s if I wanted to drop more fat. So this process continued, once consuming over 3500 calories with no cardio and dropping fat, to now over 30 weeks later on under 2500 calories and doing 4 cardio sessions a week. My metabolism adapted, because my body doesn’t want me to lose any more weight.

In short; you provide your body less energy, it will burn less energy. It’s like when your computer gets to low battery and enters energy saver mode, we now function as a sub-optimal version of our former selves.

So now we understand that our bodies try their best to stop us losing fat, this is an inevitable safety mechanism we cannot avoid. We must just be aware of it, and by not rushing things we can slow it’s adaption. In part two we will learn about ‘refeeds’ or ‘cheat meals’, these little beauties can help reverse metabolic adaption, for a short while anyway.