So, when the stimulus is the most novel and bound to elicit the most hypertrophy is when you won’t feed the assimilation of nutrients into muscle?
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good point- I’ll probably go more off of feel since idk how I’ll respond
ie if I’m hungrier, I’ll eat more
Why not just eat more irrespective of hunger?
That is not a rhetorical question.
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You don’t have the greatest track-record with going off of your intuition. Or rather, your intuition seems on point but you have a horrible history of not acting on it.
I don’t know when, if ever, we’ll get through to you but here are some observations from the outside that maybe will weaken your thoughts that work against you.
- I know of high-level climbers that weigh more than you, even adjusted for height.
1.1. Which is curious, because you engage in lifting, where weighing more would help. In climbing, being light helps (to a point, there’s been some recent observations that once the BMI goes under 20, those climbers tend to tank) - Regardless of what others weigh, your body is telling you “I can’t weigh this little”. Your joints are perpetually cranky and you don’t have a period. The last part just screams female athlete triad/RED-S ordinarily, but I’m convinced your issues are much more advanced than that. Since you won’t listen to this bio-feedback (which is severe) I don’t know if anyone here would trust you to eat more when you are hungry.
Athletes have, for a long time, occasionally set their health aside. The smart athlete might do this, in the short-term, but realise that after comp-time it’s time to fix whatever issue they’ve been “ignoring” so that they can continue to engage in their sport long-term.
I heard Dan John say in a talk recently (paraphrasing): “the guy with yellow eyes might outlift me today but if he’s not around in twenty years then who was the successful one really?”
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I want to try and find a maintenance intake so I know where to adjust from
Why?
Not a rhetorical question.
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Great point and so true! Applies to so many things in the world of athleticism. We’ve had this one guy in our strongman league, he was a real strong u105 kg competitor. Also he was very present on social media and kinda made out to be the next big thing by his mentor, the godfather of German strongman. Anyway I competed against him in the 2019 season and it was very noticeable that he was in pain every single contest he showed up. I’m not talking niggles, he had legitimate back pain. He was on pain killers before during and after competitions and wore a lifting belt to work the day after a heavy show or training. He ignored this all season. When he finally checked up on it he got diagnosed with 3 slipped discs among other spinal deformities. As a young self employed man this was a shock and also sadly, at least to this day and for the near future, the end of his strongman career. I feel bad for him but if he would have just taken the time to fix his issues early on he would most likely still be competing today.
And this was only the end of an amateur strongman career. The equivalent in Anna’s situation is much grimmer.
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Maintaining a position you know to be unhealthy and counterproductive is a terrible idea.
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We use calories, protein, carbs, fats, for more than just energy and building muscle. They are used to make the literal structure that is our body, i.e. tendons, ligaments, connective tissue, the lining of our gut, our vital organs, our brain, all of those things are made from the building blocks which we assimilate from the food that we consume. When you restrict long enough or extreme enough the literal structures of our body get impacted, and recovering from that can take a long time. Given how long you have been underfeeding, do you think you can afford to get it wrong and undershoot maintenance? Hell, even things like dopamine, serotonin, etcetera. are fabricated from what we eat — and you have admitted to tending towards depression recently.
Another thing, when your blood sugar is constantly low which will happen when you are undereating and omitting carbs/always timing carbs around workouts your body constantly has to produce adrenaline, epinephrine, and cortisol to just get through the day. The consequence of that will be that your adrenal glands, where a lot of those hormones come from are taxing your pituitary gland which governs your thyroid. And the raw materials from which your sex hormones would be made are now being used to instead make those stress hormones. Which is how women lose their period, and men get erectile dysfunction and low libido. Both sexes will have trouble building muscle, not just because those stress hormones are catabolic but also because there’ll be less raw material to make anabolic hormones such as testosterone.
Don’t find maintenance, be in a surplus, support your training, reduce your activity levels outside of lifting, get healthy and then start considering things like maintenance when you are out of the danger zone.
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Quoting to emphasize how important this paragraph is.
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I’m guessing it’s because I want certainty
HOLY SHIT 
good point
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Week 19: Day 2- easy day
5x(max pushups+800m walk)-90,70,61,79,62
- legs not feeling it so procrastinated again, really happy w/ pushups, the “deceiving yourself” thing really works
Certainty of what?
Certainty of a baseline intake value that I can go off of?
Without this, I feel like I don’t know how much I should be eating. If I found a value, then I could adjust, stick to it, and essentially put nutrition on autopilot
You could do this with a surplus. Maintenance isn’t necessary at all.
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I feel like you’re framing this as a new thing - intuitively eat - but you’ve already decided to use it to find your “maintenance”, meaning you won’t be intuitively eating for long.
Your maintenance IS a surplus, because your body crashed it’s hormones in protest of your bodyfat levels, so if you eat a normal amount it will do whatever it can to return you to normalcy.
No matter what you do or how you do it, you need more bodyfat. If you eat enough and walk/condition less, you will put on some fat. That’s a good thing. But you think that’s a bad thing, which is why you use words like “fluffy”, which is like me calling Powder hairy:
This is why, again, I check back in to ask where you’re at with professional help. Have you asked your parents?
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I guess so? I’ve just been used to surpluses/deficits being in relation to maintenance i.e. "200"kcal above maintenance.
The hormonal shit storm your eating and activity have created pretty much make “maintenance” a useless term. Your body doesn’t know “maintenance”, nor will your maintenance ever be close to any calculator or recommendation for someone your size. Your maintenance calories will be found once you actually face your situation and get healthy. Anything that isn’t directly on that route is regression.
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You need to gain weight though. You don’t need maintenance for that. If scale is moving up, continue. If not: eat more.
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And why do you need that control? Most people do not.
Until a lifestyle factor changes, and then you wouldn’t have certainty anymore and since you are used to having control this would prompt anxiety and you’ll start the loop all over again further perpetuating a habit that does you harm.
Quoted to second this!
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