I hope you are having a great week!

 

One of the most highly-read blogs on the JillFit site is about breaking, what I call, the "cardio cycle"--that is, when as competitors or fitness enthusiasts, we get caught up in doing hours and hours of cardio simply to maintain our weight because our metabolisms do not respond as they once did.

 

Before I did my first figure competition, I distinctly remember an IFBB figure pro telling me that she did 2 hours of cardio a day in her off-season. I was horrified. Then, years later I found myself doing the exact same thing. And for every prep, I would do more and more minutes on cardio to attain the same level of leanness I did at the last show. It was draining, both mentally and physically. My body simply was becoming less and less responsive to exercise, and my diet was pretty clean already. Where to go from here? 

 

Well, I finally got fed up and quit cardio cold-turkey (and competing). My husband, Jade, a naturopathic physician and co-founder of Metabolic Effect Inc, helped me to use nutrition, supplementation and lifestyle changes to tone my endocrine system and rehab my metabolism so that I didn't have to do hours of cardio. I cut out all that cardio, and you know what? I only gained a couple of pounds! All that effort to sustain a 2-3 lbs weight loss...whaaaat? Looking back, it's insane. But I didn't know anything else. I had no other tools at my disposal.

 

For a while, I thought my story was unique...because no one in the physique world was talking about it. However, recently, more and more competitors and fitness models have been sharing similar stories of extremely low-calorie dieting, cardio cycles and metabolic resistance. It's refreshing to know I'm not alone, but it is also alarming that so many of us are damaging our metabolisms in an effort to attain a fleeting leanness--which, of course, is the opposite of a sustainable fat loss lifestyle.

 

I am writing to share more information on Metabolic Damage and how it works, how it progresses and how it can be treated. Metabolic Effect just wrote a fantastic blog about it here. I encourage you to check it out, especially if you have experienced yo-yo dieting in the past (either from competing or chronic dieting). There's still a lot to learn on this front!

 

As always, I would love to hear from you, find me here :)