Hey guys, Maybe you can shed some light on this one. For someone we calculate to have a Basal Metabolic Rate of around 1800kcals/day (female) who’s main goal is to lose around 1kg per week.
I calculated that to lose 1kg per week she would need to acheive 7.716kcal deficit per week to lose this 1kg amount. I aimed for a 1,200-1,300kcal diet per day which she religously stuck to with a high protein and complex carb intake. She also did 6X 1hour sessions per week of cardio and resistance exercise maintaining her heart rate above 140BPM consistantly AND going to failure on most weights exercises.
I can safely say she stuck to her diet and exercises regime religously. but with limited results. After the first 5weeks she had lost around 4kg but then hit the wall. In response she upped her cardio from 600kcal per session to 1000kcal per day in two seperate (morning/night sessions) yet she lost no further weight (gained some back)after 12weeks.
She had her testosterone tested which was found to be seriously low and was advised to go off of the Pil straight away in a hope that free testosterone would go back to normal levels.
Her fitness now rocks (HR recovery is awesome after interval training) but i want to know if her lack of progress was likely to be the result of her low testosterone or if we overdid her calorie restriction and exercise.
What do you think?
Is a 500kcal reduction in diet PLUS 600kcal calorific expenditure a large enough reduction to result in a reduction of her metabolic rate or not? How badly would a low free testosterone reading impact her weightloss goals?
I think she almost certainly isn’t getting enough to eat. You’ve got her energy expenditure to as much as 2800kcal per day by increasing the cardio, and are giving her less than half that many calories to eat - that’s not going to work out well.
In general, doing two hours of cardio work a day is an idea no one here will agree with. It’s not doing anything for her metabolism and, with so few calories, she’s probably cannibalizing muscle (negating some of the resistance training). Worst case scenario is that her body is recognizing this huge calorie deficit and hoarding body fat in response to perceived starvation, exactly the opposite of what you are looking to accomplish.
Considering she’s been at this for three months, I would up suggest you up her diet to at least maintenance for several weeks, and cut out the vast majority of that steady state cardio. If she’s got an 1800 BMR and doing 30 minute resistance workouts, get her something around 2200kcal per day for a while.
I don’t think testosterone is a major factor here. Reduce the steady state cardio, emphasize resistance training and feed her more, her test levels will probably rise anyway.
Oh, and while I’m thinking about it… you didn’t say much about her diet, but think about replacing some of the carbs with healthy fats.
Thanks Vermilion,
Her daily calorie restriction was planned as 500kcal deficit via diet and 600kcal per day via exercise (a total deficit of 1100kcal per day from her Basal metabolic rate).
she chose to up her deficit to 500kcal diet and 1000kcal exercise per day. bear in mind she still maintained 1200-1300kcal per day in diet. Her diet was akin to an atkins style diet although i strongly recommended she keep complex carb intake high.
I gave her some info on fish oils but otherwise left her fat intake as a byproduct of increased protein consumption. Do you feel a 600kcal deficit via diet and 500kcal deficit per day is too much? my textbooks say this should be fine yet her response has been poor. what deficit would you consider too large and why?
appreciate your input. I dont know if her low testosterone is a byproduct of her overtaining and i certainly beleive it to be possible if the calorie restriction was too high. She had noticed a decreased libido but pretty sure it was before the start of our program. She is also diabetic and i’m unsure how this has affected her. her thyroid is supposedly fine.
I would say that she is not eating enough. With that much cardio and very low intake of calories her body is doing to try and hold on to as much fat as possible.
[quote]Outrage247 wrote:
I would say that she is not eating enough. With that much cardio and very low intake of calories her body is doing to try and hold on to as much fat as possible. [/quote]
IThanks Outrage247. Both responses so far seem to feel that she was not eating enough. Still not sure if the calorie restriction was as “huge” as it seems. Unless my calculation of her BMR was off I still feel her calorie restiction was not unreasonable. Clearly you need to be in calorie deficit to lose fat or none will be lost.
If her BMR or “maintanance” calorie intake is 1800kcal most sources seem to agree that I can reduce her diet by 500kcal per day via diet to acheive a weekly 3500kcal deficit and not negatively impact metabolism.
Also I stayed within the ACSM’s guidelines of not reducing calorie intake to under 1200kcal per day. As our goal was to lose about 10-12kg in a 3month period I needed a greater weekly calorie deficit than 3,500 (should lose about 1pound/week. As I could not achieve this via a further dietary restriction i had to allow for roughly 500kcal energy expenditure per day to total 1000kcal via diet and exercise per day.
Now this did not work for her…but all sources seem to indicate that a 1000kcal restriction from BMR (500kcal via diet, 500kcal via exercise) IS OKAY and SHOULD NOT affect her metabolism to the point of “going into starvation” mode and holding onto bodyfat.
The only real error I can see is that maybe she was too small to begin with to aim for a 2pound per week loss and the 1000kcal deficit may still have been too large. Yet something clearly did not work as I cant deny she didnt get the results we were aiming for. I am taking on board your comments, but if I have calorie restricted too much i will need a reference to re-evaluate and figure out where I went wrong.Please critique why I failed with my maths and if you can find some sources for me to look into to verify this it would be awesome.
Would diabetes and very low free testosterone levels have impacted at all here?
[quote]scholtz wrote:
In response she upped her cardio from 600kcal per session to 1000kcal per day in two seperate (morning/night sessions) yet she lost no further weight (gained some back)after 12weeks.[/quote]
So for 12 weeks she was burning 1000 kcal/day from exercise on a 1200 kcal/day diet? That’s just fucking stupid. Not only could that cause T levels to drop through the floor, it’s not hard to imagine that degree of starvation causing her BMR to tank as well.
I doubt your method of weight loss would be advocated by any regular author of this website.
[quote]Wimpy wrote:
scholtz wrote:
In response she upped her cardio from 600kcal per session to 1000kcal per day in two seperate (morning/night sessions) yet she lost no further weight (gained some back)after 12weeks.
So for 12 weeks she was burning 1000 kcal/day from exercise on a 1200 kcal/day diet? That’s just fucking stupid. Not only could that cause T levels to drop through the floor, it’s not hard to imagine that degree of starvation causing her BMR to tank as well.
I doubt your method of weight loss would be advocated by any regular author of this website. [/quote]
There were tests done of soldiers just coming out of Ranger training. They averaged a 1000 cal daily deficit for several months. Their levels of T were measured and found to be at “castrate” levels.
[quote]Dark_Knight wrote:
There were tests done of soldiers just coming out of Ranger training. They averaged a 1000 cal daily deficit for several months. Their levels of T were measured and found to be at “castrate” levels.[/quote]
Double edged sword…The last thing they want hardcore commandos to be thinking about is poosay’ (hence the urban legends about saltpeter being put into G.I. rations)…Deprivation is built into training courses like this (sleep, food, etc) and this goes back to the 1940’s/WW2 era, so should be no shock these results came out as you described…
The troopers are as strong as pack mules (which is essentially what they are in a sense), but “lean and mean” not carrying a lot of extra LBM (except the genetic freaks) and are all putting time in the weight room when they can…(Airborne!)
[quote]Wimpy wrote:
scholtz wrote:
In response she upped her cardio from 600kcal per session to 1000kcal per day in two seperate (morning/night sessions) yet she lost no further weight (gained some back)after 12weeks.
So for 12 weeks she was burning 1000 kcal/day from exercise on a 1200 kcal/day diet? That’s just fucking stupid. Not only could that cause T levels to drop through the floor, it’s not hard to imagine that degree of starvation causing her BMR to tank as well.
I doubt your method of weight loss would be advocated by any regular author of this website. [/quote]
Hey Wimpy,
No I did not advocate a 1000kcal per day restriction from a 1,200kcal per day diet. My original recommendation was made from a 1,800kcal diet. Nontheless you are correct that at one stage she was exercising SOME days with this deficit and this was indeed clearly too much. It seems painfully apparent to me that our lack of progress was due to calorie restriction. This is my first foray into offering specific calorific advice.
As i said i had calculated BMR to be 1,800kcal to be her T.D.E.E using the Harris Benedict formula which allows an activity multiplyer to be used to find her “maintance” calorific needs (ie calorie intake to neither gain nor lose). The rest of my reasoning i have already stated. I can provide sources to back up my decision to aim for a 1000kcal deficit but i do acknowledge that this may still not ultimately have been the ideal figure for my client.
From what I have found It seems that you should not drop below 1,200kcal for women at all. I had read this from the ACSM’s guidelines as being that the diet should not drop below 1,200kcal rather than diet in combination with exercise. It would seem in retrospect that the best i could have aimed for was a 600kcal deficit via diet AND exercise (or around 500gram per week) for her body size.
I have asked her to resume a diet of around 1,800kcal with a 40-60min per day exercise routine until I can further evaluate her diet. If anyone can provide good sources for me to learn more it would be greatly appreciated.
Your caloric restrictions were fine but her body was able to downregulate to that caloric intake level sooner than you would want. The best way to counteract that would be to do some type of caloric/carb cycling so that the body does not sense that less food is actually coming into the body.
Maybe you should get her metabolism back up to her previous maintenance level before she had started the cut and try again…this time with some kind of cycling method.
[quote]Blacksnake wrote:
Dark_Knight wrote:
There were tests done of soldiers just coming out of Ranger training. They averaged a 1000 cal daily deficit for several months. Their levels of T were measured and found to be at “castrate” levels.
Double edged sword…The last thing they want hardcore commandos to be thinking about is poosay’ (hence the urban legends about saltpeter being put into G.I. rations)…Deprivation is built into training courses like this (sleep, food, etc) and this goes back to the 1940’s/WW2 era, so should be no shock these results came out as you described…
The troopers are as strong as pack mules (which is essentially what they are in a sense), but “lean and mean” not carrying a lot of extra LBM (except the genetic freaks) and are all putting time in the weight room when they can…(Airborne!)
[/quote]
Granted, straight up caloric restriction will still not approach the rigors of Ranger School… I was just making a point.
[quote]TheBlade wrote:
what’s her macronutrient breakdown?[/quote]
Hey Blade, I haven’t got the figures for her specific macronutrient breakdown on hand but will get them to comment. We focused on high protein and complex carbohyrate intake. For example her breakfast was a high protein muesli and some fruit. her lunch tended to be a bunch of greens and Tuna/Chicken with her dinner being similar. Not a lot of carbohydrate intake was via pasta, rice or breads although this was not avoided Pre workout to supply sufficient muscle glycogen for workout intensity.
As previously mentioned fat intake was not planned (incidental to protein intake) although in future i am very likely to recommend. If you like I can easily provide you with an example of her daily intake.
[quote]blue9steel wrote:
It’s generally bad to choose a number for a calorie deficit like 500, you want to go with a percentage, and anything more than 20% is too extreme. [/quote]
Thanks Blue9steel,
I have come across percentage recommendations before but have not found too many mainstream sources to guide me through this approach. Don’t suppose you know of any? I guess with her I was really aiming for the maximum weight loss for a designated period. Overall she still lost 5kg over the time period and I am still pleased with this result overall.
However it is the stagnation that I am concerned with as our losses need to be premanent. I have no intention of messing with my clients metabolism to achieve short term results. Her drop in testosterone was a concern as I need to know if it was our diet that was a likely cause of this or if it was external to my program. I will look further into %age based programs rather than a pure number yet most sources still recommend aiming for a 500kcal difference.
so I take it that when you are refering to a 20% reduction you are talking about a 20% reduction from TDEE (total daily energy expenditure /maintainance) via diet alone? where abouts did you come across your information?
Thanks Blue9steel.
[quote]LillGuy001 wrote:
As was already mentioned, adding in a bunch of good fat will also help her to accomplish her goals.[/quote]
Yeah. It seems to be a common comment. To be honest i was more concerned about total energy balance regardless of the source but macronutrient breakdown (particularly fat intake) is something i will be sure to incorporate in the future. appreciate the input.
[quote]There were tests done of soldiers just coming out of Ranger training. They averaged a 1000 cal daily deficit for several months. Their levels of T were measured and found to be at “castrate” levels.
[/quote]
Hey Dark-Knight,
I am very interested to know if my program indeed affected her T levels. From what i can glean a 1000kcal deficit can be recommended for some individuals but this is largely dependant on thier size. While i have no actual figures on who can absorb such a deficit from TDEE and still maintain metabolism from a size point of view I guess those classed as obese would definately count.
In my case she is far from obese at 163cm and 70kg yet she still has some bodyfat to lose. As for Ranger training I guess I’m clearly not at that knowledge level…but maybe one day! Also thier doesnt seem to be much info about the timeframe at which a 1000kcal or even 500kcal deficit could be maintained before tanking metabolism. any ideas?
[quote]sloh wrote:
Your caloric restrictions were fine but her body was able to downregulate to that caloric intake level sooner than you would want. The best way to counteract that would be to do some type of caloric/carb cycling so that the body does not sense that less food is actually coming into the body.
Maybe you should get her metabolism back up to her previous maintenance level before she had started the cut and try again…this time with some kind of cycling method. [/quote]
Hey sloh,
Noticed from your profile your a college student. any chance your studying anything in this area? You mentioned my calorie intake was fine but the concensus here is I may have overcooked it?
Yes i have brought her back up to TDEE and reduced her to 6X 1hr sessions per week until i can figure everything out. I know little bits of peices about carb cycling and such from what i have read but to be honest to not know enough about it to incorporate it into her diet. Cycling or even planned OVEReating sounds interesting but i think i would have a hard time convincing her (or any of my clients) to do it.
I am going to measure her up tonight to see where we are at right now in terms of centimeter changes and re-assess our posistion (she had upped her intake to around 1500kcal over the last week, and reduced her sessions somewhat). I guess thins may provide some anecdotal evidence of how she responds to a slightly higher calorific intake above 1200kcal. i’ll Keep you posted.
