Client Case Study

This client started with me in November 2017. She was under-eating just like most people that come to me. She was eating 2000 calories before we started working together which honestly isn’t as bad as I’ve seen it for some people.

I immediately bumped her up to around 2400cals/day at 155p 275c 75p with two refeeds per week at 325c. She weighed 170# and was a little apprehensive about the jump in calories, but she trusted me and ended up hyper-responding. Hyper-responding is a type of reaction that someone can have to reverse dieting. You can read more about that here.

However for this client, I didn’t start right away with reverse dieting. I started with a cut, but her initial macro prescription happened to be way higher than what she was currently taking in. 

Over 15 weeks, her macros went from the initial prescription to 155p 150-200c 45f. This is what I like to call “poverty macros” LOL. We got her fats and carbs down fairly low and she had already gone from 170 to 154 at this point which is an incredibly picture perfect weight cut.

After these 15 weeks were up, I immediately bumped her macros up and gave her a diet break. You can read about those here. I set her macros at 155p 250c 60f for the week. During this week, she continued to lose weight which is pretty stellar, so I actually kept increasing her macros from there in a form of reverse diet.

This is definitely a special case and it does NOT always happen like this, but her body responded so well, and I wasn’t about to do a slow reverse diet when I could just make a big jump and have her body respond so well.

Slow reverse diets are more-so better for the psyche as it doesn’t give you this fear of gaining a bunch of weight at once with a huge calorie increase. Either way, maintenance is maintenance. & typically people will continue to lose in a reverse diet (hyper respond) because they’re still technically in a deficit from where their actual maintenance is. 

Anywho - so far, from her diet break week, we’ve increased things all the way to 155p 350-400c 80f… and I’m actually about to increase carbs again most likely and she’s holding weight steady around 149-150. She trusted me from the get-go with a huge calorie increase. She also trusted me when I told her to eat a lot more after a very successful cut without fear of weight gain. 

Throughout it all she’s had AWESOME progress because she truly trusted me and just trusted the process. I hate that phrase but it’s so true! You have to go through different phases sometimes even a few cycles of these phases in order to reach your goal, whatever that may be.

Not everyone will respond in the way this client has, but it was an awesome story that I had to share.