Meal Frequency – Part 2

Why meals more isn’t better

In Part 1 we looked at whether there was any logic or reasoning behind this. Basically coming to the conclusion that what may sound good on paper, doesn’t actually come to fruition.

No more following theories like mindless chickens.

This time round we are going to take the nail in the frequent feedings and hammer it in a little further.
Why Frequent Makes No Sense

There are two main reasons:

1. Individuality
2. Impending Doom

Individuality
First up let us consider something that is incredibly important when starting diets or nutritional protocols; The Principle of Individuality. Which in simple terms just means you have to take the persons individual characteristics into account, cookie cutter, just doesn’t cut it. That means their physical characteristics, their environment, their preferences etc. etc.

So when we hear blanket statements about how eating every couple of hours, or eating mini meals, are given, they stamp all over the individual. So what might work for The Rock, may not be very suitable to anyone else.

For example, a small female, weighing in at 140lbs, trying to lose fat, may be aiming for 1400 calories a day. Split that between 6 meals, and you have 233kcal ‘meals’. Not only is it going to be a pain preparing 6 tiny portions of food, but they’re going to feel dissatisfied every time. It would make more sense to split it between 3 meals, making each 466 calories. Enough to actually represent a meal.

I am not saying frequent feeding is bad, but to say it is for everyone is wrong. Heck a 200lb male who is trying to pack on size may need over 4000 calories, he’d probably do well of more frequent meals.

We are all unique and different in so many ways.

Impending Doom
Sounds pretty horrific right? Well because the individual is removed from the equation failure in inevitable.

I remember back when I believed all the ‘theories’ about mini meals. So much so I would always have my tupparware with my food, and just incase I couldn’t take it with me I had a shake replacement. This added a load of stress onto my plate, and at the time I was studying for exams and it made the situation a lot harder.

We all have enough things to worry about during our day, nutrition need not add significant stress. How often do you hear ‘I missed a meal’ and the negative connotations associated with that? All the bloody time.

The person feels ashamed, like they have really done something wrong. This can led lead to giving up, stopping their diet and blowing out. Completely destroying their progress.

The truth is meal frequency does not matter for 99% of people. So trying to abide by some magical number of meals makes very little sense, and as seen above, can be destructive.

My View
We come back to the principle of individuality, and so long as you have the right overall nutrition in place, eat when and as you like. As I have said before, self experimentation is a wonderful thing. Find 6 meals is easy and keeps you fuller and more energised? Great stick to it. Maybe you find 2 meals allows you to enjoy your food more, great stick to it. Stick to what is providing you sustainable results.

Next time I am going to look deeper, into what might be an optimal frequency of meals for muscle gain and fat loss. Remember, optimal on paper may not always work out in practice, however it is still something we can strive for.

Spread facts, not dogma, if you liked this or any of my articles please feel free to share them using the social media icons below #ReviveStronger

‘Honey Monster Puffs’ The New Health Food?

‘Honey Monster Puffs’

The new ‘health’ food?

So Sugar Puffs are re-branding themselves to Honey Monster Puffs because sales have been driven down by the sugar scare that is currently rife. Not only that but they are changing the recipe of our beloved sugar puffs to contain 20% more honey and less added sugar.

So they will now contain 8.6g sugar per 30g serving, from the original 9.3g. Big whoop. Critics rightly pointed out that once broken down by the body, honey will do the same thing as the added sugar would have. Furthermore, there are worse offenders out there such as Coco Pops and Frosties which contain 11g of sugar per portion. Thus, we can clearly see the change is a marketing ploy, removing sugar from their brand name and assigning a ‘health halo’ by adding that the product contains honey, which is seen as natural and therefore good for you. This frustrates the hell out of me, and highlights how ignorant the consumer is and why education is still the only way to help people make wiser choices.

Education , Education, Education

People need to understand that when it comes to their diet what makes it healthy vs. unhealthy are not individual food choices, but the overall macronutrient and micronutrient contents of their entire diet. However, because the majority of the population do not understand this, they get mis-guided by companies, the news and word of mouth.

Governing Bodies are clueless
Companies are now required to put nutritional traffic lights on their products, assigning different colours to a choice of dietary aspects of the food. Typically calories, sugar, fat, saturated fat and salt.

I have a two big problems with this. One the colours are referring to a guideline daily amount, this is a generic and completely unindividualised figure. Just think, a athlete needs a load more calories and therefore fat than an office worker who is sedentary.

Second, they are focussing on some of the wrong things. I am fine with the calories and overall fat being put there, but sugar, saturated fat and salt? The governing bodies are focussing on the wrong things, they would be better off providing a macronutrient breakdown of the product i.e. fat, protein and carbohydrates.

Sugar at the end of the day is the final form of any carb, and we are not really helping by pin pointing just sugar. Why saturated fat is on there I really don’t know, as no one is sure how much we should really be getting, what we do know is we need a balance of each type of fat and that saturated fat is essential for healthy hormone function. Finally salt, this has been highlighted and vilified by the nutrition press recently, and in my view wrongly. It’s been known for over 20 years that people with high blood pressure who don’t want to lower their salt intake can consume more potassium-containing foods. It is the balance between the two minerals that matters. So if they do have salt on their, surely the potassium content should also be provided?

Confused Consumers

I feel bad for calling the general population ignorant, because I don’t think it is largely their fault. As shown above the government are focussing on the wrong things, and do not provide adequate education. So consumers only have the news, media and branding to base their choices off. And there is the problem, the news often tout complete bull, governing bodies focus on the wrong things and companies are concerned about their bottom line, not our health.

People need to educate themselves, but they need to use legit resources and question everything. This is good daily practice that can be used throughout life. Be open minded but skeptical, base your opinion on facts and if something sounds fishy, question it.

MyFitnessPal is screwing you over

How could it be screwing you over?

I love myfitnesspal, if you have me as a friend on it you know I have a streak of over 600 days (to add me snhall1990). That literally means I have logged into and tracked foods for 600+ days. That consistency with my macronutrient intake is what has gotten me results, along with following a solid exercise regime. However, there are ways in which using myfitnesspal could be your downfall, and I want to touch on these today.

1) Using their calorie calculators

Myfitnesspal has it’s own inbuilt calorie calculator, which is great, it gives you an idea of how many calories you need to maintain your weight. Key in that sentence is idea, these calculators are just estimates, you cannot guarantee these to be right, and I have seen them really mess people around, being out by 100s of calories. Say it was out by 200 calories a day, you were eating this much to sustain your weight, a 200kcal surplus each day is 1400 calories by the end of the week. After a month that’s an extra 5600kcal for the month, which is 67200kcals extra for the year, which could lead to over 15lbs of unwanted fat gain.

I am certainly not against calorie calculators, but they must be used with caution. If you do use them, then make sure to keep an eye on your scale weight, and how you are looking, then adjust from there.

2) Applying a macronutrient Ratio to your diet
I HATE ratios, people asking whether a 40/40/20 split is superior to a 60/20/20 split etc. The problem is that these are extremely unspecific and not individualised. Everyone has a given amount of protein that they can successfully utilise, a general rule of thumb is 1g per lb. Next up is fat, it’s great, full of nutrients and makes food taste awesome, but again past our EFAs and getting a good mix of them all there is an upper limit of how much we want. Carbohydrates have the biggest individual variability, because they are our bodies ideal energy source, and therefore the amount we need is dictated by our personal energy expenditure.

Lets take a 40/40/20 split of carbs, protein and fat and apply that to two people weighing 180lbs, one who needs 2000 calories and another who needs 3000 calories. The 2000 calorie individual will consume 200g of protein and carbohydrates with 44g for fat. The other would get 300g of protein and carbs with 67g for fat. Now you can see both are getting too much protein, and for the person consuming 3000 calories it is getting really excessive. Blanket ratios are not specific at all, and are by all means useless and a waste of time. Every macronutrient serves it’s own purpose and each person requires different amounts of each.

3) Silly sugar recommendations
If you have a decent intake of fruit you will notice that you go over your sugar recommendations every single day. There is nothing wrong with sugar, especially that which is naturally occurring in foods, such as in fruit. I hate to think that people reduce their fruit intake because they feel they need to get below a recommendation made by myfitnesspal. If anything they could have an added sugar recommendation, but even then I think it’s best ignored.

4) Incorrect food entries
This is really frustrating, because on myfitnesspal anyone can enter the data for foods. So you could end up with the wrong numbers through human error. Furthermore, sometimes when you scan an item the numbers fed back are off. If you are not careful this could really mess with your totals by the end of the day. I have had it where someone didn’t bother entering the protein on items, and then over-consuming on protein to hit my totals. Doing this rarely is fine, but if it is done with any consistency it could really throw you and if you are in contest prep it could be really important to be as accurate as possible.

These are just some of the things to be aware of when using myfitnesspal. Nothing is perfect and myfitnesspal is actually a really really great thing. So don’t delete the app and ruin your streak, but be aware of the above, because it could be ruining your progress.

Not sure where to start with your macronutrients? Need someone to take away the guess work to allow you to start using myfitnesspal and eating a diet you love and getting results you want? Be sure to check out my online coaching services, you can see a few of my clients who have had terrific results here.

Porn Obsessed

Food Porn duhhh…

The following was written 1 week out from the UKDFBA in 2014…

Sorry if you expected something a little more perverse than this, but I have to confess I am addicted to food porn. Or better I am obsessed with food in general, if you asked me what I was thinking about or doing it would be food, hence this newsletter being on the subject!

So why am I so food focussed right now? Well you might have guessed it, it’s because I am dieting. As you transition to lower and lower calories every item of food you put in your mouth gets a higher value put onto it. Not only do you need to be more concerned about it’s quality, you get concerned about how it tastes, how fulfilling it is, because you know if you make a bad choice you will feel it later. Just have a look at my instagram if you don’t believe me.

Pretty #foodgasmic wouldn’t you say? In a recent paper by Eric Helms, Alan Aragon and Peter Fitschen they look into the psychological impacts of long term dieting, specifically for contest prep. Did you know it’s been found almost half male drug free competitive bodybuilders binge post competition. One third reported anxiety, short tempers or anger when preparing for competition and more than 80% suffered with a preoccupation with food. People who know me might be thinking…that explains a lot..haha well hopefully not. Although I have survived one post competition binge I definitely have a preoccupation with food. The physical effects of semi-starvation is much like the signs and symptoms seen with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. As you can see, my food porn obsession isn’t so out of the ordinary.

This is why I wanted to make this post, because I am aware of the dangers of getting extremely lean. And being aware is part of the solution of straying from the potential consequences. As open and frequent communication about these topics can really help. Further to this, I have a coach, he is amazing and there for me when I am concerned. Personally, I recommend everyone looking to get into contest level shape get a coach, particularly if it is your first contest. This is why I also think it is essential that your coach has competed themselves, because it is impossible to relate if they haven’t. The mental and psychological side to contest prep is what separates it from just fat loss, and trust me when I say it is a major part that can make or break a successful prep.

I am now 1 week out from the UK Drug Free Bodybuilding Association (UKDFBA). So hopefully my obsession will start dying down and I can get back to a having a healthy relationship with food. I certainly intend to enjoy a ‘free meal’ post contest, but I am not going to binge. My fantastic girlfriend has actually booked us in for a meal at Duck and Waffle in London, its got some posh nosh and I intend to enjoy the hell out of it.Thanks to everyone for the continued support throughout my contest prep. It has been an experience I will remember forever and it has made me grow stronger as a person. If anyone is interested in competing and have questions, please contact me as I would be happy to help, and together we can Revive Stronger.

My First Natural Bodybuilding Show

Highlights, thoughts and feelings

First off I apologise for the lack of a newsletter last week, those of you who follow me on the social media know I competed in my First Natural Bodybuilding show. This was through the NPA and was the South East Championships. As I said it was my first show, I actually never planned to do it but I am so glad I did, because I learnt LOADS!

The Game Plan

1. Shave body hair and apply tan, to best show off muscle detail.
2. Eat/drink enough to achieve fullness but so not to ‘spill over’ and look less defined, and maintain this look.
3. Ensure to come under the upper cut off limit for the lightweight novices weigh in.
4. Pose to best demonstrate symmetry, size and definition to the judges.

The above is the basic elements to what I was trying to achieve on the day, essentially to best represent my physique to the judges and meet their criteria. However, being my first show, not everything went to plan, so let me take you through the reality.

The Reality

1. So I had been shaving my body hair for the past month. I thought that was fine. However, for some reason I didn’t consider my underarm or forearm hair. This counted against me and the judges picked up on it. Lesson learnt, get rid of ALL body hair (facial hair is OK). Second, my tan, this was a bit less certain, the night before my girlfriend kindly applied a layer of pro tan. The next day you’re advised to shower it off, I did so and it looked very weak. So we did another layer, this was an error as the showering off process is very important to its proper application. Back stage we had the finisher by pro tan, and were applying this, it wasn’t going on so well due to adding the extra layer of tan in the morning. But we felt we had gotten a dark enough tan, and from some pictures you’d think we did. However, we were wrong, I looked washed out on stage. The lights were VERY bright. The judges commented that it looked like I didn’t have a tan, and looked washed out. Again, counting against me. They stated that I may well have placed higher if I had amended the above two points. Yes I am very disappointed in myself, but I will not make these errors again!
2. My coach had provided some guideline macros and meal timings to eat. These were quite wide and he said it would really depend on how I was responding on the day. But I have been dieting for over 30 weeks, tracking my macros with precision. So I definitely have a pre-occupation with hitting numbers and so was too focussed on tracking then I was on the impact on my body. This led me to not achieve a pump or fill out, I was flat and didn’t look my best. 
3. This one was hit. Weighed in after my breakfast well below the cut off and then just sipped on water till the final weigh in. It was at 11am, so obviously you had to be careful about how much you consumed beforehand. However, I expected digital scales, but they had old fashioned ones, and so I question the degree of accuracy.
4. I have been practicing my posing each week for months. However, not spending much time on it and when into the final months you’re pretty exhausted all the time. So my willingness to practice was very low, plus I personally don’t have any good areas in my home to pose. So looking back, I would practice more early on, and then make it a habit to pose every single week, and film it. However, my posing on the day was OK, but I didn’t angle myself to the judges. This was key error on my part, and you will notice it in the videos (youtube link below), it makes a massive difference. Also I held my legs too close on some poses, purposefully done, but looking back, it was an error, making the sought for X frame hard to come by.

So there you have it, I messed up a little. However, learnt a great deal and the mistakes made are pretty easy to fix and work on. It wasn’t like I was told I was top heavy, or wasn’t lean enough. So it was a very positive experience. My main show is now in 2 weeks time, below is what I am going to do to improve upon my performance and do myself justice :).

Actions

1. In comes Veet, to rid the under arm and forearm hair! And to get a perfect tan I have booked a professional tan on the day, it was expensive, but I think worth the investment. I will not get these two things wrong!
2. Stop being such an obsessive tracker. I do not need to be precise with macros on the day, I just need to eat carbs and fats to achieve the look I desire. Pizza post weigh in and plenty of food, that is not tracked, only tracked by how I am looking.
3. So for this show the cut off is even lower, so since my first show I am continuing to lose weight. I have been consistently under 75kg for the past few weeks, but of course weigh in is not first thing, so I need some leeway.
4. Continue to practice my posing up until the show and be sure to angle myself towards the judges during the competition.

Overall the show was an AMAZING experience. People there to show off their hard work and share their journeys with one another. Some had lost huge amounts of weight to be there, and that in itself is commendable. I won’t lie, it was stressful, and I am a stressful person, so that didn’t help.

For my next show I am going to almost sit back, relax and just do my best, no point stressing because overall it is just about getting on the stage and enjoying myself. For me the journey getting here has been the reward, trophies or placings are nice, but mean little in reality. I have learnt SO much getting to such low bodyfat levels, and will use this not only to help others but it has given me confidence that I can achieve anything.

I vlogged the whole thing, to check it out visit HERE.

Losing Fat is Hard – Part 2

How to get past the hurdles

Last time we touched on why losing fat is hard, and now we are going to delve into each of these hurdles. I am going to give you some tips and tricks on how I approached these and got over them. Fat loss is hard, getting into single digit body fat is even harder, but the same principles apply, just I have had to find every trick in the book.

So what’s so hard?

Making sure you’re in a calorie deficit.

How do you know you’re in a calorie deficit? You first have to estimate how many calories you burn, there are various calculations that can be performed for this one you might want to try can be found here. Once there you need to create a deficit by moving more and eating less. Now you should be in a deficit you need to track your progress to make sure you actually are. This means taking weight measurements, I recommend you take these at least 4 times a week first thing, and take the average for the week. A loss of 1% of total bodyweight is a healthy and quite sustainable rate for most. If your losing much more or less, you need to adjust your calorie intake or output. For women you might also need to take weekly photos and focus on monthly weight changes instead of daily or weekly, due to the hormonal differences between the sexes.

When fat loss stalls, what to do?

So you will come to a point where the fat just won’t budge anymore, this is when you need to either reduce the amount you’re eating again or increase your output. What you decide to do is very much individual, and down to many aspects. Yet the key is to get into a deficit again. I will note however that dropping 25g of carbs each day would account to 100kcal a day and 700kcal a week. Think how long it would take to do 700kcal vs. dropping a slice of bread out of your diet a day, one seems much easier. However, when food intake gets low the idea of doing 700kcal of cardio gets more appealing. There is a careful balance to be made.

When are refeeds/diet breaks appropriate?

The only people who should be having a refeed are those who are lean. If you are pushing above 15% body fat as a male or 25% as a female you don’t really have a need for a refeed. However, diet breaks may be necessary for anyone, because these have many purposes over and above reducing the negative impacts on your metabolism. A general rule is for every 12 weeks of dieting you take a break. A catch all approach would be to eat at maintenance for a period of 2 weeks. This can vary depending on body fat levels, hormonal responsiveness and psychological factors.

When social occasions arise, what to do?

Plan plan plan. This is my main tip. Diets should be permissive, not restrictive. However, this means you need to plan occasions in. So if you know you are going out later for a meal with family, put it in your food diary early and adjust round it earlier in the day. If you find it hard to avoid treats available at work, make sure you have your own snacks on hand, that fit within your diet. Whatever you do, don’t stress out, if you do slip up, just make sure to get back on track.

Keeping motivated for training.

Getting weaker is no fun, feeling tired is no fun. I know what this is like and training gets tough. What you must do is focus on the process, know you are lifting at your best, and take you eye off the number of kgs pressed and focus on doing your best. The key is to get the work done, performance losses are inevitable and stressing about them doesn’t help the situation.

Find foods that keep you satiated.

This was an interesting one for me, high volume foods seemed to do the trick for a very long time. Such as going for veggies, slow cooking your oats and eating things such as puffed wheat. Great choices are butternut squash, mushrooms, cucumber, leafy vegetables, puffed wheat, beans, lentils, salsa, american mustard, egg whites, courgettes and many more. Yet the point will come where nothing fills the hole. I also found I was bloated a lot of the time, but still hungry, and this wasn’t good for my training and wasn’t comfortable. So I made a switch to starchier carbs, and focussed on making meals and enjoying my foods. Tricking yourself into thinking your eating more is also useful, using smaller bowls, plates, and cutlery. I like to stuff my smaller bowls and eat with a tea spoon, this makes it look like more food and it takes me longer to eat.

Cravings, making you want to break your diet.

This is where flexible dieting really helped me. No foods were off limits, but the amounts were, I have to account for everything. However, so long as I account for what I eat and adjust my other choices round it, I could pretty much eat anything I wanted. That was a major plus. However, sometimes there are things we just cannot fit into our diets. So good ways round it is to make homemade varieties, such as using low calorie wraps for pizza bases, and switching to low fat cheeses. You can also make great tasting protein pancakes and cakes themselves. Something else that helped me was chewing gum, coffee and diet sodas, these gave me a sweet kick and curbed hunger for a period of time.

Low energy levels.

This is almost unavoidable, you have to accept it. However, small things can go a long way. Such as caffeine, energy drinks and coffee have been very handy indeed. However, don’t abuse these as we do get de-sensitized to caffeines effects. I personally restrict myself to 3 larger caffeine servings a day. This is normally 3 Americano’s, I could easily drink more but I know more would lead to more, so having a limit is a good idea. Another thing that helped me in times of low energy was sugar free gum, the flavour it provided kinda hyped up my brain, sounds odd but there is some research showing that flavours can actually help with energy levels. Furthermore, having some good music can really help.

When it comes to getting through long cardio sessions, having a distraction is great. I could get through 500kcal of low intensity cardio easily if I had someone to talk to. If there isn’t anyone around, and for the most part there wasn’t for me, then podcasts are a good alternative.I hope some of my experiences and tips help you in your fat loss pursuits!

Part 3: Moving back to maintenance – ‘Reverse Dieting’

The ‘reverse’ diet – what, why, how?

So far in this series we have learnt about what our metabolism is and how it adapts to what we ‘feed’ it, we have learnt the importance of slow progressive dieting and how to incorporate ‘refeeds’ to help blunt the unwanted side effects of dieting. So we have the tools to best get down to our desired body fat %, now it is time to move out of the deficit, allowing our body again to reach homeostasis. However, this is the point at which can make or break your entire diet, this is where if you are not careful you can put back on all the fat if not more than you started with. Avoid the yoyo diet, and please continue to read about the ‘reverse’ diet.

The reverse diet is just as it sounds, when we diet changes are slow and progressive, the reverse diet is much the same, apart from the fact we slowly increase not decrease our calorie intake.

Essentially the aim is to bring our metabolism back up to what it should be, the easiest way to do that is to just eat more. However, if we just scoff a load more food you’ll put on a load of fat in a hurry, especially because our body wants to get back to its old self. To avoid this you have to increase your calorie intake slowly, allowing your metabolism to adjust upwards gradually. That is if you want to avoid as much fat gain as possible, there are cases in which a faster approach may be more suitable, but I am principally talking about people who have followed a successful and healthy diet.

Everyones metabolism is a little different, some are very responsive and others less so. Responsive metabolisms do very well off an increase in calories, and you can give them quite sizeable and frequent increases. However, others are not, and therefore you must take a slower approach.

I have a few approaches I like to put in place for my clients, but one that seems to work quite well is to increase carb and fat intake by 10-20% initially, getting them to maintenance. At this point you may want to lower protein in place for more carbs, because carbohydrates are the real ignitors for our metabolism and are protein sparring, plus you’ll be coming out of a deficit so the need for high protein intakes drops.

From this initial increase you’ll want to take visual and body weight measurements to then pick how next to act. Each week from here I would increase fat and or carbs by 5-10% depending on how they looked and how their weight responded. I have seen people drop weight and look better week to week while reverse dieting, but I have also seen others need very slow increases. Again like anything it is very much dependent on the individual. Also while doing the above you would be making sure to try and reduce the amount of cardio taking place. You would keep progressively doing this until the person was eating back up to a reasonable number of calories.

The above steps could be continued for a long time, especially if the person wanted to transition into a muscle building phase. I also want to note that some people actually find the reverse diet harder than the diet itself. This is because the changes are quite small, making it almost feel like you are still dieting. This can be very tough, especially when you do not have a particular goal in mind. I’d happily allow some people to speed up the reverse diet if they really couldn’t hack it. I personally feel that very small adjustments are silly, that is the best way I can say it. No one wants to continually feel like they are dieting, so an by increasing macronutrients by less than 10g really seems quite, well silly.

So now you have learnt how to get really lean in a healthy manner and then how to build yourself back up out of the deficit. Key is to remember everything our body does is to try and remain in homeostasis, our bodies don’t want to get really lean. So to get their we need to take it slow, and then once their we slowly need to build up our metabolism. Our metabolic rate doesn’t get damaged or break, we don’t enter some weird starve mode in which we can no longer burn fat. Our metabolisms are wonderful things that adjust to what we give them, treat them with respect and you can manipulate it to get the results you want in a healthy and sustainable manner!

If you enjoyed this or any of my newsletter content please like and share my newsletter, any support or feedback is much appreciated!

Sami Chamoun- ‘I decided to give Steve a go and couldn’t be happier’

Sami has got a great balance between life, exercise and his goals. We started building him up out of a fat loss phase, slowly increasing and tweaking his macronutrients to successfully reverse diet. With this Sami has got stronger, healthier and has remained lean in the process. During this time Sami has been training just three times a week and has weekly social events, enjoying alcohol and delicious food. The key to his success is consistently getting the big stuff right, that means getting in the main compound movements and being mindful of his macros.

Here is what he had to say:

I’ve trained for a number of years, but for a large part of that have rejected diet. I first discovered Steve on YouTube and found his commentaries entertaining. It was not long after this that I began to follow a macro-based diet. I trained under some more well-known coaches for a while but wasn’t really happy with the quality of service I was receiving. I decided to give Steve a go and couldn’t be happier.

His responses are very prompt and seems willing to answer any questions/concerns I have. I am enjoying my training more since joining and he’s helped me build my metabolism right up as I lead into a lean bulk. Good bloke, great coach, highly recommend.

I am so glad Sami came to me, I feel like we have a great understanding of one another, which is very important, because the relationship between a client and coach often dictates the success of the person involved. The below clearly shows how successful his reverse diet has been:

3 Month Progression
Starting Weight	169	Starting Calories	2200
Current Weight	171	Current Calories	2600
% Change	1.2%	% Change	18.2%

As you can see he is enjoying 400 more calories and has gained little weight, and from looking at his strength gains and monthly photos, me and Sami are happy that the majority of this is muscle.

I look forward to seeing Sami continue to eat more and get stronger. If you are interested in online coaching, check out my packages here.

Part 2: Moving back to maintenance

Refeeds, Cheat Meals & More…

So in PART ONE we learnt about how our metabolism is adaptive to what we give it. It is there to keep us alive and when we enter severe calorie deficits it acts in a way to reduce our energy expenditure. Here I am going to introduce the idea of refeeds, in which an individual comes out of their deficit for a short period of time to try and negate the metabolism adapting. 

So what exactly is a refeed? Well as I said it is a short term break from being in a calorie deficit. Their prime purpose is to maintain psychological and metabolic health. Their frequency and length depend person to person, some people may take a week off, others may just have them once a week. They have also been called cheat meals, but IMO this term is different. A cheat meal to me is a meal that is not accounted for, you break your diet completely and at most it acts as a psychological break but can set you back. A refeed is planned, it has a proper purpose and most of all you account for it.

Hang on? If I am losing fat then why bother ever implementing a refeed? Well you know how it gets harder and harder to lose fat as you diet, it’s because you metabolism is getting slower. So it makes good sense to try and maintain as high a metabolism as possible, thus we take have refeeds. They help reduce the speed at which you move away from you original metabolic rate.

Right so now we know what a refeed is and its purpose, when and how do we implement them? Between coaches there is quite a varied approach. Personally I implement them when I see a stall in progress, or the person is showing some signs of metabolic slow down. Up until that point I am happy for them to continue as they are, the number and length is then very individual. This is because our metabolisms all differ.

OK so what exactly do we do on our refeed day? Well we must bring overall calories to maintenance or slightly above to get the result we want. This is your CURRENT maintenance, not your old one, as we know our bodies are burning less energy now. I personally like to bring up carbs quite a bit, as these have the most impact on our metabolism. In doing so I also reduce fat and protein a little, because carbs and not being in a deficit is protein sparring, and fat is more easily stored as fat, making sense to reduce them a little. This also gives more room to increase carbs, which as noted raise our metabolisms the most. Reject carb phobia, carbs are your metabolic friend.

When is best to take them is really up to you, some people like to take them when they have their rest day, so they can enjoy more food and be social. Others with more performance oriented goals like to take them prior to their most intense training day. For me I take it the day before I perform deadlifts and do High Intensity Interval Training.

There we have it, you know what a refeed is, how it might be implemented and why it is important. One final note is that because you have eaten more food and likely more carbohydrates your scale weight the next day or so will increase. This is completely expected, and it should level out over the course of a few days, and you’ll continue to hit new lows if implemented correctly!

Refeed Essentials:
1) Use them when you notice signs of metabolic slow down.
2) Calories must be at or above your CURRENT maintenance intake.
3) Avoid pigging out, try and keep some structure to the refeed.

Next week I will continue in our moving back to maintenance series to talk about reverse dieting. If you liked this or found it helpful please share it on the social media!

#REVIVESTRONGER

Black Friday Coaching Special!!!

So it’s holiday season, time to enjoy time with others, relax and eat all sorts of goodies. Good on you, this shows you know how to live a little! And I’m going to give you one more reason to sit back and relax. However, you’ve slaved away in the gym all year, getting into good shape, and it required work. Now with less time, more opportunities to fall off or stall than ever. You might look to take a break, or give up all together, using the holidays as an excuse. I am here to help, by giving you THE SECRET WEAPON to add to your arsenal, to stay fighting fit. That is your own Personal Coach, me. Yes I am your secret weapon, and can be the difference between failure and success. I will be there for constant support, allowing you to stay on track. No more guessing, how many calories? how much cardio? which exercises? I will be there to cover your back, so you can focus your energy on doing the simple things. What do you get by choosing me as your coach? Nutrition guidelines built for you, allowing you to gain muscle, lose fat or just get fitter. Training plans individualised for your personal goals, lifestyle and experience. Accountability via daily tracking and weekly check-ins to keep you on track. Stress reduction through constant support via email, giving you peace of mind you have all you need to hit your goals. All of this is very affordable, and I will be offering a limited offer for Black Friday! To get in on these deals early be sure to contact me asap (snhall90@gmail.com). Join Team Revive Today!