Over the last year or so, i've battled a pretty serious eating disorder. i've been in the clear for a few months, and have noticed my metabolism is pretty insanely ****ed up. I'm trying a method of slowly ramping cals back up (700-800 is maintenance @ sedentary for me right now. No, i'm not kidding)
The recovery process for something like this is as follows: Stop exercise, and slowly increase calories every week. The amount you start at depends on your body size/gender, but I would be looking at starting around 1300/day for week one, 1400 week 2, 1500 week 3, 1600 week 4, 1700 week 5, 1800 week 6, 1900 week 7, and then maintain that until weight stabilizes and body temperature is normal. If you exercise during this period, you must increase your food intake to *MATCH* the caloric output, otherwise you're doing more harm than good in the recovery process. The idea is to slowly reverse the adaptation the body has made to the famine. (Increasing LBM will NOT help, because the adaptation mechanism the body uses essentially makes every process in your body more efficient. If my metabolism = half what it should be, then exercise is HALF as effective, for example)
My normal body temp. is 95.5-96.9, and it should be 97.7-99 depending on the time of day you take the measurement
I had the idea that perhaps a mild cycle would speed the process up of repairing metabolic damage. As my understanding is that AAS increases your resting metabolism, perhaps this increase could permanently raise it back to a normal level, as well as fight fat gain during the recovery process. Any thoughts?
**edit
Here's some background info.
I've been lifting hard for a few years. This last year, I learned how to eat and saw huge muscle growth, but can not shed fat for the life of me due to the ****ed metabolism. I can lose weight if I basically stop eating and exercise all day every day, but that's not practical or sustainable. As soon as I stop, the weight comes back on. An example that i've done is a sustained 1500cal diet of around 50% protein, making sure I get my EFA's, and most of my carbs are fiberous veggies and or post workout shake. I was doing an hour or two of fasted cardio in the am, and then either lifting for an hour, followed by 30-60 mins low intensity cardio (hill walking on a treadmill @ 3mph, keeping h.r. low to avoid cortisol problems), or just doing another two hours of cardio if i'm on a non-lift day.
I've been able to effectively bulk on 1800 cals if all I do is lift and no cardio (gaining fast enough for a trainer to ask me what the hell i'm taking)
I'm confused, horrified, and scared. I don't know what to do at this point. I can't clean my diet up anymore, I can't eat any less or exercise more...I don't want to give up, but I don't know if I can keep this up if it's flat out not going to work.
I understand the process I have to take to fix things, but after spending this long of a time struggling, I don't know if I can mentally handle gaining 20+lbs of fat in the recovery process.
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