- This topic has 68 replies, 1 voice, and was last updated 2 years, 11 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Everyone seems to be freaking out about the rather hardcore calorie-restricted diet AnnMarie Michaels, aka “Cheeseslave” has been on for the last 2 months. Discuss it here.
Her description of her diet…
http://www.cheeseslave.com/how-i-lost-20-pounds-in-2-months-on-a-high-carb-high-fat-diet/Well i no longer see her site as a healthy site to read i guess. She didn’t do it for her health she did it for body image and being skinny i think.
to be honest i think she really freaked out doing eat for heat which is understandable, it is a scary path when your body seems to not lose the weight. Matt how do i change my pic? :)
I was really shocked how much she reacted to perfectly nice comments with a ton of spit and spite. It was like, whoa, dude! Eat a cookie! I also wonder if the 2-3 glasses of wine she says is drinking is suppressing her appetite like Gwyneth on Your Eatopia calls “drunkorexia”.
http://www.youreatopia.com/blog/2012/10/31/bingeing-is-not-bingeing.html
Oh dear. She doesn’t seem to have learned much from her RRARFing experience does she? I noticed that she was being deliberately vague about what her caloric intake actually is and very defensive about her choice.
I personally don’t see that starvation level caloric intake is the ‘next step’ after RRARFing, if you’ve done it for long enough and STABILISED at your higher metabolic rate, your maintenance calorie levels should be much higher.
For example, when I began eating the food I couldn’t eat more than about 1600 calories a day without gaining. Now I need to eat around 3500 in order to maintain my weight and activity levels. I did gain about 15kg in the process, but the weight is well distributed and I’ve gained a lot of muscle as well. I may want to focus on fat loss again one day but right now, I think it’s too soon. I’ve only been stable at this weight and calorie intake for about 4 months and I think if I did something that lowered energy intake at this point it would be a bad idea – metabolic function would decrease. I think AnnMarie will find the same thing.Also, one of the women defending her claims says that those in concentration camps ate 500-800 calories, which Ann Marie than takes up as proof that she’s fine eating 800-1000 calories. But in a cursory search, I didn’t find much evidence for such a low calorie count. One was around 650, but it seemed it was more of an experiment to see how low one could go and for how long- essentially one of the many horrific experiments that would qualify as torture. Other working camp data says that it was 1300-1700 depending on activity level. This, to me, seemed more plausible as they were working them to the bone and at least saw the need to get some labor out of them. Anyone else know more?
Then she keeps countering those that say she’s on an extreme diet by saying that an optimal weight loss rate is 1-2 lbs/wk but she says she’s lost 20 lbs in 2 months which calculates to 2.5lbs/wk. She even quotes ” When people lose more than two pounds (.91 kg) per week, especially for several weeks at a time, this is considered fast, and significantly greater amounts can be considered extreme weight loss.. It seems so disjointed.
Caz, you can do that at http://www.gravatar.com
I did a post a long time ago about concentration camps…
1302-1744 at Auschwitz according to one source – http://180degreehealth.com/2010/01/the-concentration-camp-dietAs for Cheeseslave, as I stated in the comments on one of the recent posts, I’m not too worried that she will screw herself up because she knows the many ways that a suppressed metabolism manifests. I do think it’s quite different when one goes to lose weight with a high temperature vs. a low one – weight comes off more easily with less rebound.
Still, if I were a gambling man, I would bet that as soon as Cheese stops starving herself to such a degree, causing a big appetite-suppressing surge in adrenaline, her appetite will come back with ferocity and her desire to exercise will vanish. Considering all the weight loss research, that would be a VERY safe bet.
But hopefully her lengthy rest and refeeding priming will spare her of the typical outcome.
As sucky as I believe dieting is, I think it’s great that AnnMarie has found a formula that is working for her. I suspect her weight loss is so easy and effortless precisely because she rested and refed beforehand. Personally I find that even *thinking* about any kind of restriction (calorie or macros or whatever) drops me right back into eating disorder land and immediately throws me off my hard-earned intuitive eating habits. It’s not worth it for me. Diet Recovery 2 4 Life!!!!!!1
I do like that her approach focuses on adding activity, and the FitBit seems like a great tool for that (though the calorie-counting piece of it… not so great).
But it does seem like she’s playing with fire. Remember your first diet? The one that was so easy because your metabolism was undamaged? The weight fell off, and then you wanted to keep going and it got harder and so you dug your heels in and restricted until you were starving. Or you didn’t keep going, but stopped at a reasonable weight and then a period of stress in your life made you gain a few pounds and you freaked out and tried to go back on the original diet but it was harder and you were stressed out so you decided to double down and starve yourself because it was the only thing that made you feel better?
OK, maybe that was just me.
That definitely wasn’t just you. And great to see you Gazelle.
There is no doubt that refeeding like she has for so long and so successfully can “reset” a person’s ability to lose weight with traditional methods. Hopefully Cheese won’t go through the whole diet escalation process again.
For me, I lost weight through massive amounts of exercise, less weight lost and more rebound weight gain with each 4-month round of hardcore physical activity.
By doing is to many times and so many rounds my body is incredibly entrained to completely shut down metabolically in response to an exercise-induced calorie deficit. I have to keep my exercise levels fairly moderate.
Yeah, I knew I should’ve just searched on 180 ;)
I know you’re still trying to keep it cool with Cheesy, Matt, but you gotta see that she’s pretty hard-core refuting everything you’ve been writing, especially in that piece about concentration camps. You pretty much grilled people over the fires for saying the same stuff that she is right now.
In the nytimes commenter board some person responded that they had family who had survived the camps or knew people or heard direct accounts or whatever, and that even when refeeding commenced, they “couldn’t handle the food” and died (supposedly because the “normal” intake was too much). Now, after reading Gwyneth’s site it seems like the likely culprit was that they were still fucking starving! Read her “Extreme hunger” and the one that talks about difficulties in getting clinicians on board with realistic feeding protocols (I’ll have to look it up) on YourEatopia.com
Anyway, it is very interesting about the mind-fuck we’ve been given when it comes to actual low calorie diets and the repercussions.
http://www.youreatopia.com/blog/2013/5/25/inpatient-underfeeding.html
This is the one I was talking about.
The part that threw me for a loop was her insistence that she lost 20% body fat (She mentions it in the post) in two months. She now insists she has 20% body fat and that she’s overweight. Everything I’ve read on body fat and body composition suggests 20% is on the low end of the fitness spectrum for women and borderline athletic.
She also states she was 40% a few months ago and is 20% now. My back of the envelope calculations suggest (168 with 40% = 100 pounds of lean mass, 148 with 20% = 118 pounds of lean mass) that she’s done the impossible. Not only has she lost a net 20 pounds she gained 18 pounds of muscle. (Or the bio-metrics she’s tracking are off)
I do not dismiss the possibility that she keeps it off but the route she is taking is the typical extreme crash diet. She also seems to ignore the fact that the body defends body fat levels and that feeling starved amongst overweight people is perfectly normal.
I felt sorta sad to read that. I thought she totally relaxed about food intake after her rrarfing experience, but I guess she really wanted to lose the excess weight. I’m happy for her, but I hope her caloric restriction doesn’t develop into an unhealthy obsession (like it did for me)~~~~
Is weight loss caused by extreme caloric restriction even sustainable long-term? it would suck to have that weight bounce back when she goes back to eating normally.
One thing I really liked in Go Kaleo’s book is the idea that you start and continue eating at the level that supports your goal weight. It will take you longer to get there, whether up or down, but you give your body a chance to acclimate to that.
So for example, if I’m at 185lbs, and want to be at 175lbs, I’d eat the ~3000 calories/day required to maintain an active, healthy 175lbs, rather than the ~3100 calories a day to maintain an active, healthy 185lbs. That’s around 100 calories a day less, which means it might take 1 month to see 1lb of fat loss. Losing that 10lbs might take almost a year, but when I get there, my body is already acclimated to 3000 calories and doesn’t have much to rebound from.
Most people do the opposite, which is- they eat way under maintenance when losing, or way over maintenance when bulking. Then they transition to a maintenance calorie intake, and there’s usually some internal backlash.
I should also mention that Amber encourages tweaking based on biofeedback. That 3000/day calorie goal will work only if you experience satiety and no metabolic slowdown as a result. You play around and go with what works. Your ideal weight may be higher than your goal weight, in which case you adjust up. You want enough food that you’re not hungry and have energy to be active.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.