Risky Fitness — Mood and Clothes

I’m addicted to a fitness YouTube channel. It’s called Miss Fit and Nerdy and it consists of an intelligent young woman talking about diet and exercise and fat loss and muscle gain, all things I’m interested in but haven’t found a good source of information for. The YouTuber in question, 24 year old Marisa, goes to the gym a lot, doesn’t believe in cardio for long-term weight loss, and eats something called “adaptogens” for the health benefits. She actually reads academic research from exercise and nutrition studies and seems to have a solid understanding of what works and what doesn’t (keep in mind she’s 24 years old and seems to be genetically thin). Her advice on exercise is to “lift heavy” and to only do tons of cardio if you love it and plan on doing it for the rest of your life. I know from my own experience with running a lot that over time your body adapts to cardio and stops helping you lose weight. I also know that reducing your calories lower and lower slows down your metabolism and also stops helping you lose weight. She addresses this second issue by citing the results of a study (go to 2:20) done on two groups of people. The first group ate below their “maintenance” calories for a period of time, while the second group alternated eating below their maintenance calories for 2 weeks with eating at their maintenance calories for 2 weeks. The second “alternating” group lost more weight, and this was attributed to their metabolisms staying higher than those of the people in the first group. This all means that you could potentially keep your metabolism up (and lose more weight) by eating more over the long term. This all makes a lot of sense to me and gives me hope that I don’t have to limit my calories to 1800-2000 for the rest of my life. I don’t know exactly what will happen when I stop losing weight on this diet, and I have to figure out a maintenance plan. I certainly don’t want my maintenance plan to be as restrictive as my diet is now, so this whole concept sounds promising.

The thing is, playing around with my food is dangerous for me. I think of all those people doing “cheat days” and know that I could never do that myself. I have a history of binge eating, which is part of what got my weight so high in the first place. And if I start messing around with my calorie count, I’m afraid it might trigger some dysfunctional eating and/or bingeing. Because while some people can eat for fuel and fuel only, I have a much more emotional relationship with food. Binge eating and eating for comfort have always provided me emotional and chemical release. Even as a young child, I would steal and hide food for secret binges in my room, always ready to whip the food under the covers in case my mom or dad came in. My most recent bouts of bingeing were no secret, but the extreme of my binges was certainly disturbing to my husband and family, and of course, to me. Two years ago, when I was off my meds so I could go through TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation), I ate a steady diet of peanut butter M&Ms for weeks, going so far as to sort the M&Ms by color so I’d stop eating them in a certain obsessive sequence. And then last year, during that horrible time when I was unmedicated and having severe mental health symptoms, I was eating an absurd amount of donuts.

Once I got properly medicated this time, I resolved to go on a diet and lose the weight. Being so heavy was exacerbating my suicidal thoughts, was physically uncomfortable, and was devastating to my self-worth. So for the past year, I have been limiting my calories to no more than 2,000 a day, and more recently aiming for 1,800 a day. And it’s been working. It started out really slow because my meds were keeping my weight elevated. But once the Seroquel was taken out, I started losing about a pound a week. And this is with a very minimal exercise routine I only started 8 months ago: a few weight machines 3 days a week with some walking and a little bit of jogging on alternate days. So the way I see it right now, I don’t want to mess with success. I’m happy with this slow and steady progress and bare minimum workout. But I am preparing myself for that inevitable day when it stops working. I don’t want to become dependent on massive workouts to maintain my weight, and I certainly don’t want to reduce my calories any further. So should my metabolism slow down enough to stop weight loss, I’ll want to have a backup plan. And this system of alternating low calories with high sounds like it could be the answer. As I said, I’m not changing anything right now, but I could try it in the future. And I hope that as long as I keep things structured enough, I could do it without a hitch.

The thing is, I don’t want to ignore common sense. We all know by now that crash dieting doesn’t work in the long term. We all know that “muscle burns more than fat” and so weight lifting is important for weight loss. So maybe this new information about keeping your metabolism high by eating more just hasn’t become mainstream yet. But if there’s science to back it up, I don’t want to ignore it- it may become the next mainstream common sense. Because that’s how it seems to me- like common sense. If reducing your calories causes your metabolism to slow down because your body thinks it’s starving, it makes sense to take measures to counteract that. I mean, if doing endless cardio just leads to needing more cardio to lose weight, weight lifting sounds like a good alternative. No one is disputing that. So why not use this new dieting information to my advantage? I want this weight loss to be for good. I never want to gain it all back. Hopefully I can find a way to put this information to use and create a long-term, hopefully lifetime, solution.