Metabolic Monster

The Starting Point

What changed: Starting point.

This client signed up for a long term diet plan with the initial goal of looking lean, and the long term goal of adding size without getting fat. The client had a long history of bouncing between fat loss diets that killed his metabolism and muscle building diets that did nothing but add fat.

We start this course at the end of his initial goal--looking lean.

As you can see, by this time his Calories were VERY low. The actual daily Calorie count was a little higher than this plan calculates as the spreadsheet as it was written only lists direct calories from each macro source--but certainly, he was spending every day but his high days quite a bit below the 2,000 Calorie mark

On particular thing of note in his diet plan is that any meals marked "10g or 15g carbs" indicate that the carb sources in those meals should come from vegetable sources. In cases where you're dealing with a sluggish metabolism, you need to account for everything--so even the incidental carbs found in things like broccoli were counted by this point.

Bodyweight 161 lb · Body fat 9.0%

Introducing a Med-High Hybrid

What changed: Med-High day added (4,080 kcal) (vs the previous, unshown adjustment)

At this point were were ready to bring in a second high day. The problem is that with this approach, we have been utilizing a SUPER high carb day to help boost metabolism. There's some data to suggest that extremely high calorie intakes for short periods of time have effects on metabolism that can be beneficial in cases like this--and it has been. However, the problem is that we can't just simply add in another 7,000 Calorie high day and not expect to see fat gain.

So--to avoid that, we bring in a med-high day hybrid. With roughly 1,000 Calories above the normal medium day, it let's us teach the body to get used to handling the extra Calories and carbs of another high day without either reducing the carb count on the standard high day or bringing in a second high day with too many Calories.

Bodyweight ~170 lb (est.) · Body fat ~9.6% (est.)

Metabolic Overdrive

What changed: Low +216 kcal · Med +189 kcal · Med-High +40 kcal (vs the previous, unshown adjustment)

We stayed at the previous Calorie bump for a little over a month before making these changes, so things were starting to stabilize....but when eating 4000+ Calories per day, most people have started to change from the "my metabolism sucks, I'm always starving" point of view and have moved to the "I'm sick of eating, I can't believe how much food I'm putting down without getting fat" point of view--and that's where we're at here.

At this point, his metabolism appeared to have stabilized and adjusted again and was ready for another bump in Calorie intake. With every day but low days being north of 4,000 Calories, and even low days north of 3,000 Calories--we're starting to switch the focus more from purely increasing metabolism to now looking at ways to utilize that metabolism and food intake to improve weak points on his physique

Bodyweight ~178 lb (est.) · Body fat ~10.1% (est.)

The 7,000 kcal figure is the mega high day, one day a week. The weekly average here is 4,321 kcal/day (calculated, assumes the weekly split).