Think You Are Ready To Lose Fat? Better
Read This First……
By John Gorman, Owner of Team Gorman and
Proud Member of 1st Phorm and Strong Gym
NOTE- John has written a new book on this topic called Metabolic Capacity and Reverse Dieting and is now for sale. Click here for all the info- Metabolic Capacity and Reverse Dieting
It seems this past couple months I have received more requests from people to either help them lose weight in general or even diet for a competition, and sadly I have had to turn them away because I know from experience I simply cannot help them. It’s not that I don’t know how, or that they have too much to lose, or that they voted for Obama (ouch!). Okay, okay, I kid. Just don’t admit you did vote for him and we will all forgive you.
Okay, back to being serious because this is VERY serious and will save some of you a lot of money paying a nutritionist a nice chunk of change to basically spin the wheels. Let me give you a few common scenarios, if they sound familiar then the good news is I will be telling you how to fix your situation.
First situation I am getting a lot of recently, are people who have recently dieted successfully getting a lot of bodyfat and/or weight off their body. The prob is that after dieting, the metabolism is slowed down naturally, yet they go and eat a bunch of garbage and gain back 10-20 lbs. When they are binge eating at night, they go very low calorie the next day to “compensate” or they will do a LOT of cardio the next day. The damage is done, and you do this for a week or 3 at a time and you are back to fat-city. The bad news is this, your metab is still slowed down for the most part, but now you have gained back 20 lbs of fat and the body will NOT lose this fat, trust me folks I’ve tried myself after a show for 12 weeks, no carbs, 2 hours cardio a day just to see if the post rebound binge of eating would come off. Well it’s a big FAT (pun intended) NO. Not even a pound came off me.
The thing with this first situation is that this person wants to diet BAD, really bad. But there is just no way it is going to come off, not with my help or the very best people in the industry I am in, it’s not going to happen, not right now. If I lower calories that’s going to stress your body more, and slow metab MORE, making progress very difficult.
I had a client a couple years ago, they where in the middle of losing a very nice amount of weight, but had to have a surgery they knew about before we started. They had the surgery and we had to put the brakes on exercise, I told them then needed to continue to eat on plan and stay strict, well they went and ate a bunch of food and gained back 25 lbs in a month. They were able to do some forms of cardio and they immediately went to an hour of cardio daily to try and keep from getting fat. Soon after they wanted me to try and diet it back off of them, but it would not come off. It even got to the point that they were so stressed out trying to lose the fat they put on from overeating that when I lowered cals again, they GAINED weight from stressing the body even more. You cannot force the body to do anything, it will simply flip you the bird and tell you where to stick it and fight you tooth and nail. You have to coerce the body and try and trick it subtly, but when in this situation damn near nothing is going to work.
The answer in this situation is to 1. Stop the binge eating and 2. Start getting your daily calories higher, slowly but surely. Reverse diet- I hit the main points of this concept in a few more paragraphs below. If done slowly and correctly, you can start dieting again anywhere from 3-6 months down the road depending on the severity of metabolism being slowed down. Sounds like a long time I know, but if you want the fat off that’s what it takes. If you don’t want to do that, well then get used to being fat and not to sound harsh, but you get what you get with that mindset because I am a big believer we are an obese nation from UNDER eating with small periods of binge eating.
Another situation I have had is mostly in the form of bodybuilders or physique athletes. They have an offseason, have gained too much fat and want to start prepping for a show. Sounds typical, the problem is that they have kept their carbs and cals low so they could enjoy a binge a couple times a week. So their daily caloric average isn’t high enough to support a long prep to get down to very low bodyfat percentages. Money doesn’t mean squat to me, and I will turn this situation down every chance I get because at the end of it all, I will have to put someone on stage who just isn’t lean enough, or that I have had to take cals so low on that it further damages their thyroid and that is not going to be on me. I’d rather not even mess with this whole scenario to be honest it’s not worth the money or the person’s health.
The key to this situation is a very precise reverse dieting process, I’ll hit the main points here that I wrote in our Team Gorman Q and A:
After a show, your metab is most of the time at its low point, body fat and weight are low so the body relies on less calories overall to fuel your daily activity and your body becomes accustomed to these lower cals and metab.
You are also doing 2x a day cardio sessions this will also need to be adjusted you can stay doing 2x a day cardio. I see people do it all the day it just isn’t necessary. You can just drop it out completely, your body is used to all that cardio and calorie burning just going to nothing is a big mistake most make as well.
First move is to reduce cardio to 2x a day cardio sessions, go to 30 mins each session. This will start getting body used to lower cardio levels. Also, add in some carbs the first week, about 25 carbs will do that’s about 100 calories added in to stoke metab and get the muscle building underway again.
Most people dieting for shows aren’t doing refeeds, I would do a 2 meal refeed after weak body parts and keep that in every week for good. So for example, if you need to bring up shoulders and legs, train shoulders on Sunday, do a 2 meal refeed post workout, and train legs the following day to take advantage of all those stored carbs. For more information on the refeeds I wrote up something on how to do them at
http://nrgxlabs.blogspot.com/2012/03/team-gorman-refeeds-whenwhyhow-part-1.html
Once you get your refeed in and increased carbs by 25 for the week and pull cardio back to 30/30, watch your weight on the scale but also the mirror. By the end of the week on Saturday and Sunday, you should still be pretty tight. If you are not, keep cals the same again for a week, then increase again. If you are tight then increase cals by 20 carbs and 5 fats at a whack keeping an eye on the mirror. Also, reduce cardio again to just 30 mins daily. The scale will go up but we are watching body fat levels not worry too much about scale, but use it as a tool. I have seen people lose additional weight from speeding up of the metabolism from the food.
The next move will be to add cals in again to reduce cardio again and again until you get to about 20 mins 3-5 x a week for health and also to keep you leaner, it also helps keep hunger up so you have an appetite.
Done right I have seen this work VERY well. It’s usually a 6-8 week phase, be careful much longer than that and you don’t need to increase much more, maybe every 3-4 weeks increase by small amounts like 10 carbs at a whack. And the longer you get into offseason, the less you will eat on the refeeds, you just wont be so depleted and you wont have as much room to store the carbs in the muscle. Don’t be afraid to bump the refeed down to 1 refeed meal a week.
Everything in a nutshell is this: You HAVE to have your calories and metab in a good starting place to be able to lose fat. Take the time to get calories up (you can do this without gaining weight, slowly but surely) and eventually get cardio in a good place like 3-4 times a week for example, no more than that. For bodybuilders and physique athletes, if you try and diet for a show without having a decently managed caloric intake, you are not going to make it most likely I see it all the time. Maybe you do make it this time, but it hurts metab badly, and then next prep you don’t make it. I’ve even see it retire people, and they cant get the fat off them, truly scary stuff. I hope reading this helps someone realize what needs to happen before they start dieting again.