How Gaining 7 Pounds in 2 Weeks FINALLY Enabled my Body to Drop Fat & Build Muscle

Welcome back to the body recomposition revolution. Today you were going to learn why I voluntarily gained 7 lbs in two weeks and how that ultimately helped me to drop fat and build muscle. Let's start with a reality check, because I definitely needed one over the last year and a half. Two years actually. So my job, my business, what I do is I help women above the age of 35 drop fat and build muscle because as you know, it's a little different. If you don't know it is because of your hormones, boom, easy peasy.

Now I have a certain type of women who primarily reach out to me for help with their macros, help with their training. They want to apply for a coaching position and that type of woman is usually the type of woman who really cares about changing their body, who really wants to uncover why their body is not doing what it should, or they want to Start learning how they can make their body do what they want it to do. They are ambitious, driven, really smart. And I'm not saying that because they're reaching out to me truly.

These are the commonalities I find amongst most of the women I work with. There's some common personality traits and they are as I just listed, but I help them formulate their macros and we do that through a series of quizzes. But I have found all these women are really active. Not all of them. Most of them are really, really active and they're not eating enough. I would do all their calculations. We would find how much protein they should be eating, how much carbs, how much fat, the percentages.

We would figure out their TDEE and do all these things and you would not believe most of these women were consuming 1200 calories, 1300 calories. Even if you're 4 foot one, that's that's not enough. OK, but not just that. These women were working out four days a week, five days a week, six days a week, seven days a week, 2 times a day. They were doing maybe 12 to 18,000 steps a day. These are high output women who are literally starving themselves and they all had the same frustration. They were like, I just, I do everything I do of Orangetheory.

I'm constantly participating in boot camp classes and I run 8 miles a day and I'm doing it and I just can't get rid of this body fat. I look skinny fat. And to me, from my perspective being an outside one, I thought, well, duh, you're not eating enough. OK, let's get you to start ramping up your calories, eating the right amounts of your macros. More often than that, they have to really bump up their protein. A lot of them have to bump up their carbs. And women are pretty good on the fats like they naturally, I think we just love fat.

I love fat. And if you're a woman, I'm sure you do too. So these women are reaching out to me. They were primarily above the age of 35. They were stuck with a lot of them called it a menopause belly. They were experimenting with HRT. They were doing all types of treatments. They were working out more and more and more and eating out and eating less and less and less. And ultimately, as I said, to me, it seemed obvious, but but it's not when you're in the driver's seat. And I had that reality check myself.

So if you haven't heard, my other two episodes on LEALEA is just low energy availability. And according to research, recent research, 50% of women who identify as active are considered low energy availability. Now, as kind of vague as women who identify as active is, if you're a woman and you identify as active, whatever that may be, according to research, according to the statistics that were gathered from this massive study, 50% of them were not eating enough food for their primary bodily functions to work proficiently.

Now, what happens when you under eat, when you chronically are under fueling for the tasks that you keep asking your body to perform every day, being the Orangetheory classes, the runs, the whatevers, and you're not eating enough. Well, what happens? Your hormones get out of whack. You can't recover. You're just sore all the time. You're tired all the time. You're wired all the time because your cortisol levels are through the roof. Your metabolism downgrades. OK, Ding, Ding, Ding. Your metabolism down shifts, meaning you are now burning way less calories than you were before because it's in survival mode.

Your digestion suffers, your sleep suffers, your thyroid that goes out of whack, your muscle repair that kind of coincides with recovery, but you're not recovering. You're just sore. You're not putting on any muscle. If anything, you're losing muscle and you can see it in your reflection. You're looking flabbier, You're looking weaker. Your brain function is out of whack. Things are foggy, you're emotional. All of these things are correlated with Lea, which is low energy availability, meaning your body has adapted to this high stress, high output environment.

By adaptations, your body gets more efficient, you move less, your recovery drops, your training quality drops, your stress hormones rise, water retention increases. I really experienced that. Fat loss stalls. It's done. Your body is literally holding on to its body fat for dear life because it knows you're going to put it through another Orangetheory class. And why the heck would it let go of its fat stores? Because you're not even giving it enough calories to complete the class without having to down regulate all the other systems your body needs.

Your body will not let go of body fat primarily in your midsection, if you are not giving it enough calories to feel safe, to fuel your workouts, to build muscle. The last thing, the absolute last thing your body is going to do is release fat. So as I said, statistically speaking, 50% of self identified active women are struggling with low energy availability. Lea and most of the women who reached out to me, I could clearly see on paper, whoa, you are under fueling. You're not ever going to drop fat and build muscle by eating that much.

So when I see that on paper and in my delusional brain, I thought, well, I'm eating 1900 calories, 1800 calories a day. I'm good. Let me give you some stats, my own personal stats. I don't care. I'm 5 foot seven. I just turned 38I lift five to six days a week. I do probably 440 minute sessions of zone 2 per day. I am usually around 15,000 steps per day. I am high output. I've been training a really long time. My body needs a lot of stimulation in order to see any sort of progress. But over the last couple years, even though this is what I coach, this is what I do, I wasn't, I was not seeing progress.

In fact, I was struggling with so many negative side effects. My hair was falling out, my sleep has been horrendous. I could go on. Now, if you want a checklist of L EA symptoms, there's one on my Instagram. Go take a peek. Score yourself. It's a little quiz. You don't have to enter any information. Just answer those questions. And if you score in the L EA, I'm sure you know exactly what side effects coincide with that. Life is not good. At least it's not good in the workout nutrition part. And if you're a woman and who work so hard like I do, and to not see the results of that, that's really frustrating.

So I had to come to terms with that. And I learned through having a nutritional coach, honestly, because I truly think a coach is very important when it comes to your nutrition, your training. You need somebody to report to and to tell you when you're being delusional like me, like I was. And I learned that I should definitely be eating at least 2500 calories a day with all the activity that I am doing. And I that I don't reduce, like I'm not reducing the amount of activity because I don't want to, OK, I'll eat more.

I love food. I'm OK with that. And so I started doing what's called a reverse diet. And I definitely should have been more gradual with my calorie increase. But once I, you know, came to terms with reality and committed to eating more, I ate more. Like I ate more and my body responded quickly. I gained 7 lbs in two weeks. That's insane. And most women when they do start reverse, reverse dieting and eating a little bit more and they see that scale go up a bit, they they check out, Nope, done not working.

My body obviously cannot eat this much food. You have to go at it gradually. And I have a lot of information about how to gradually reverse diet on my last episode. But just in a nutshell, start adding in a hundred, 150 more calories for a week. The next week add in another 100 calories and so on and so forth. For me, it went a little higher than that. And again, I gained 7 lbs. And when women see that, they stop, they turn around. But because I needed to be the example I talk about, I kept going.

I kept going and I went from 135 lbs to 142 lbs. I hadn't seen that number on the scale in many years. And it was, it was, I don't know how else to describe it beyond besides kind of triggering. But as much as I coach people to stop identifying themselves at the number on the scale, I just had to keep trucking. I just kept eating and being a little more mindful of the quality food I was putting into my body. Now here is where I want you to understand the science behind that 7 LB weight gain I experienced in two weeks.

I did not gain 7 lbs of fat. And if you are doing reverse diet or thinking about it, you are not going to gain that much fat in two weeks. But your genes might feel different. You might feel a little puffy. Your muscles are holding on to more water. Your digestion is changing. It's kind of getting used to that, you know, the more calories that you're eating, but what's actually happening inside your body is glycogen restoration. When you start eating more carbohydrates, your body is going to shuttle a lot more water into the muscles.

It will, that's just science. When you start eating more carbs, especially more carbs than your body is used to, you are going to retain some water because your body is not used to getting this many carbs. And that translates to a higher number on the scale that translates to you may be looking a little bit more puffy. But a positive, a positive of that that I experienced, and I know you would too, is I had way better workouts. I was, I was getting the pump. I was, I was lifting more than I had ever lifted before.

And I felt good because I could see, I could physically see in the mirror that my body had been so depleted for so long and it was finally getting fuel again. All my muscles pumped up. I actually did not mind the way my physique looked and I didn't so much care for my face, The way my face changed. I looked very puffy, but I really liked kind of a more muscular bulbous look. I always use that word bulbous, but that's kind of how I would describe it. I finally had a butt, like a butt that I worked really hard before I could see it.

So what happened after the first two weeks? I gained 7 lbs. I started at 1:35. I went to 142. And then after that first two weeks, my weight dropped down to 139 and I took a body composition scan because I really wanted to see where I was starting and I wanted to see what would happen 30 days from that point. And I love data. I love data because you data doesn't lie. And I'm also going to post, post my body composition scan on my Instagram. You can peek at it yourself. And it literally shows side by side, my weight being 139 and all the other metrics that changed over the course of my 30 day reverse diet, or I should say the tail end of my reverse diet.

So let's talk about this 30 day period. Now at this point I was 139 lbs. The 7 LB weight gain had kind of petered down and I was just 4 lbs heavier than when I had started. I was also eating 800 more calories per day than I had eaten for years. So now I'm 4 lbs heavier. I'm eating 800 more calories per day and I'm lifting heavy the same way I always left. But here's what happened. During that 30 days, my body weight stayed 139. So at the end of the 30 days I measured again, my body weight was still 139.

My muscle mass went from 66.8 to 67.9. For me that's incredible. I I can barely put on muscle because I've been lifting so long. So to see that much muscle be put on my body in just 30 days, Oh I'm happy and get this. In 30 days, eating 800 more calories per day, maintaining 139 lbs, my body fat went from 14.3 to 14. So I lost .3% body fat. Now I did these measurements at the exact same time, in the exact same state, fed the same breakfast post workout. My body fat went down, my skeletal muscle mass went up, and my weight stayed the same, eating 800 more calories per day for 30 days.

Now remember there was that big uptick in weight for two weeks, but only two weeks and then that weight petered out. Now that was I think about a month ago. That was about a month ago. And since then I have cut my calories a tiny bit, but I have not dropped below 2400, not once. I've gone above 2400 throughout the last month but I haven't gone below which to me is kind of insane because I was eating 18119 hundred at what I thought was my maintenance and it's not and actually eating that much. My weight has gone down to 137.

I think it was 137 this morning. So I don't know, it just it's really empowering to know that if you fuel your body, what it needs to complete the tasks you're asking of it, and if you train accordingly, which means you are lifting in hypertrophy, it is possible to build muscle and drop fat. But if to your knowledge you're doing all the things correctly and you're still harboring that really stubborn fat in your midsection or you resonate with a lot of the side effects of L EA that I had described, I'm going to go through this list.

I call this the low energy availability risk Screener. And this is for females, OK? So are you accidentally fueling your under fueling your body? This assessment will identify if your nutrition, training and recovery habits may be putting you at risk for low energy availability, which does impact your fat loss, hormones and performance. OK, for all these questions I'm going to ask you, the scoring guide is if you say yes, it's two points, if your answer is sometimes it's one point, and if your answer is no or never, it's zero points.

So yes is 2 points, sometimes one point, no is 0. So #1 Do you regularly eat less than 1800 to 2000 calories while training? Do you skip meals or go long periods like 12 to 14 hours without eating? Keep your score in your head or write it down. Do you feel anxious about increasing your calories? Do you track food obsessively or avoid tracking completely? Do you struggle to consistently hit 100 grams of protein daily? Add up your points. Section 2 is training and again, yes is worth 2 points, sometimes is one point, and no is 0.

Do you train five to seven days per week without planned rest days? Do you frequently combine strength training and cardio in the same day? Gosh, I'm so delusional to even reading this back to about myself. Do you feel guilty taking rest days? Are most of your workouts high intensity, not just occasionally? That means like Orangetheory or like HIT classes, Section 3 recovery and biofeedback? Really TuneIn on this one. Do you feel chronically fatigued even after rest days? If you know, you know. Do you experience poor sleep or wake up frequently during the night?

Do you feel cold, especially your hands and feet? Do you experience low motivation, brain fog, or mental fatigue? Section 4 Hormonal signals Have your menstrual cycles become irregular or stopped altogether? Do you experience worsening PMS, mood swings, or irritability? Have you noticed stubborn fat retention despite dieting and exercise? Do you experience low libido, Section 5 performance, and body signals? Has your strength stalled or decreased recently? Don't worry, you're almost done. Do you experience frequent injuries or nagging aches or pains?

Do you struggle to recover between workouts? Have you hit a plateau despite being consistent with nutrition and training? OK, so add up your points. Remember yes is 2 points, sometimes is one point and no is 0. Total your score out of 42. Now if you scored zero to 10 low risk, you're likely fueling your body well staying consistent with your nutrition and training. If you scored 11 to 20 moderate risk, you may be under fueling in ways that are slowing fat loss, recovery and hormone balance. 21 plus points high risk for low energy availability.

Your body is likely under fueled and under recovered. This is a major reason fat loss feels stuck. If you want my help, e-mail me. I do have a little bit of a waiting list right now. I can do custom programming, custom macros I can do a combination with. I can do a package with both of those. Or you can apply for a coaching spot where I do all of it and we're in contact on my app. Or just start eating more. OK, tack on 100 calories this week to your, to your, you know, nutritional regimen. Tack on another 100 next week.

See what your body does. Experiment. But the best thing I can recommend for you is to hire a professional who can help you navigate this phase of life if you're feeling stuck. Because a lot of women are. And I was myself. And even though I do this for my job, I too had to hire somebody else to help me. So keep that in mind. I hope this episode was helpful because as I said, the majority of women who reach out to me or are women who have a lot of common traits, they're ambitious, they're motivated, they are hard working, they're driven, they want to do all the things and in actuality, they're doing too much and not giving their self what's needed.

Also, remember to subscribe. I've gotten a couple messages over the last month and I keep forgetting to address this. Subscribe that way. New episodes will automatically pop up on your feed for Apple Podcast and Spotify. The question was, how do I get alerted when you have new episodes? And that's simply by subscribing. If you do want help with your macros, my e-mail address is [email protected]. My Instagram is rack fitness under score. I just kind of post stuff about my podcast, what I'm eating, what I'm doing.

I post my grocery card a lot. I do some workout things. Just fun stuff from my real life. OK ladies, remember, give your body what it needs to do, what you want it to do. Talk to you soon.

How Gaining 7 Pounds in 2 Weeks FINALLY Enabled my Body to Drop Fat & Build Muscle

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