We often meet people who say: “I lost or gained “ an absurd number of” kilos in a month with this new diet and workout program!”. After a while, we run into this people once again, and they are now very unmotivated because they are back to their starting point after all the sacrifices they went through (and there is no doubt that they made that effort). This is why we decided to speak about a subject that is quality weight gain or loss during a diet and training regimen.

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Since a few years ago we have been guiding and coaching athletes in the fitness industry, so we know that good progress is that which is consistent but relatively slow. In fitness, our goal is to make the athlete build as much muscle as possible within a given time frame (this is obviously according to the athlete’s specific goals) and after that fase, lose as much fat as possible maintaining as much muscle as he can. Despite this being our goal, there are huge limitations within our body in terms of how much muscle it can build and how much fat it can lose within a specific time frame.

In other words, when someone tells us he lost too much weight while on a diet, the first thought that comes to mind is that that person extremely restricted his body from calories during the diet period, making the body use it’s fat resources. Also, he lost some water and muscle in the process. This process normally translates into a danger sign for our bodies, because our body’s function is to keep us alive and balanced.

Well, when our body feels threatened because it is being given very little food, it will starting orienting it’s efforts to reduce the caloric expenditure and start saving all the calories it possibly can.

Now you can start to understand why, as soon as you get off the diet it looks like you ruin all your results after a little while, your body was in an extreme deficit and is trying to hold on to everything it can to stay alive, because it felt threatened with the lack of energy it had access to. So, from those 10kg you lost, 4 or 5 were  a good quality loss (fat) and all the rest were a bad quality loss (water, muscle – signs that your body was desperate to reduce caloric expenditure, seeing as the amount of calories you burn is largely related to the amount of muscle you have).

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The opposite happens when somebody wants to pack on muscle mass. There are those who say: “With this new trendy workout I put on “an absurd number of kilos” in a month. In this case, we start to worry immediately about adjusting the person’s diet to a diet with less calories, because the body can’t build that much muscle in the said time frame, because the biological process of building muscle is extremely complex and requires the body to work immensely. So, odds are that most of the weight gained isn’t actually muscle, but mainly unwanted fat mass.

Our solution:

Like we said in the beginning, when your diet requires a lot of sacrifice, it’s usually a bad sign. What is important is that you maintain a lifestyle that can provide results without making you feel like you are jeopardizing your daily life. After a while, you will look at yourself and not believe that you are much better than you were and you didn’t even feel the time go by! This is the rule that makes us endorse flexible dieting and implement it in our lifestyle. Our athlete members (amateurs or not), all went through a fase where they did very restrictive diets, 100% clean, low in fat, extremely high in protein, where they couldn’t eat out, go out at night, etc. All this effort in order to obtain a body free of fat and with aesthetical muscular proportions. We got to a point where our quality of life was being compromised. Nowadays, with flexible dieting, everything has changed. Our quality of life has improved dramatically, we don’t restrict ourselves from the pleasures of life, and we have exactly the same results (maybe even better ones) than we had before, seeing as we don’t have any eating disorders or deficiencies. This way, we stay much more faithful to the plan, and we are able to progress at the right speed so that the progression has as much quality as possible. Sometimes we aren’t even aware that we’re dieting. Also, we don’t lose our results when we transition from the fat loss fase into that maintenance or muscle building fase.

So don’t forget, if you’re making too many sacrifices, something is wrong.

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