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Well…I think I watched the video a long time ago, and don’t have the patience to go through the length all over again.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but he says to increase calories (or was it carbs?) very very slowly (something like 50-100 a week or I forget)…the gist of it is to go very slowly and work up to a high amount and the body will adjust without the rebound/overshoot of weight gain.
I guess if you’re not terribly metabolically damaged it might work…
but for someone such as myself with a very long past of dieting/ed/metabolic damage this did not and will not work, mentally and physically. My body kept gaining weight on small amounts with no sign of recovery until I just gave in completely. Basically I was hardly doing any exercise and increased to 2500/day (for EIGHT months) but I was still fatigued, orange palms, cold, dry skin, AND had put on about 30 lbs. I couldn’t do it anymore; I had to give in to the gnawing hunger I continued to have because I still felt trapped. As soon as I ate all I needed I puffed up 30 more lbs in just a couple of weeks and I’ve stayed there ever since, but all my bloodwork is now normal and I am not fatigued anymore. Edema dissipated after 4 more months (15 months in to recovery). After ‘just eating everything’ I also got my period back two weeks later. I don’t really believe significant repairs can be made on such incremental amounts; instead I think the body just hoards whatever it can to fat because it will still think it is starving.
Personally, plunging in head-first caused the most pain, but it also ‘got it over with’. I wish I had never spent those 8 months in limbo. I wish I had just eaten the damn food. I’d be a lot further along to perhaps getting back to my set point.Were you on a slow gain before you started adding more? Wonder if it wouldn’t work as well if you’ve already got to the point you’re regaining on low calorie. I don’t think I could have done it either because my hunger was like an inferno as soon as I started eating more. But I was maintaining on low calorie so maybe I would have stayed at that weight, I don’t know. But I needed my energy back fast for all the work I do anyway. A lot of people don’t seem to have that appetite like I do, they have a hard time eating 2,000 calories and I’m like, what is wrong with you lol. Give it here, ill eat it for ya! ;) always was a big eater from the time I was a little girl. I ate like a boy.
One thing that bothers me a little about aggressive refeeding is I have a farm. I’ve raised a lot of livestock and also plants. There are a lot of general rules that tend to apply to everything, and one of those is all changes should be slow. You change diet, so it slow. Something’s dehydrated, give water in a limited fashion until the animal is rehydrated, then free choice. An animal is starved, limit the food and slowly increase until the animal is up to appetite. Then it’s appetite can decide how much. Same with a salt starved animal. Seedlings that have been indoors must be deposed slowly to the sun or thy but. A dairy goat breeder I know got back a very valuable buck she had sold a few years back. He was starved. Now she’s got over 20 yrs experience with goats so she knows not to give a bunch of grain in this case but she did feed him back heavily with roughage and caused liver failure and had to put him down. She didn’t know you had to basically starve them back out of it. The liver is functioning at way too low a level to process a normal or even excessively high load that comes with a normal to above normal food consumption.
But anyway, back to the video, his weight *loss* approach is moderate compared to most. He also talks about working up to as much calories as you can when maintaining to prevent getting in a bad place.
I disagree with Ashley. At least for ED patients, slow refeeding is not beneficial. Unless refeeding syndrome is present, studies show that patients are more likely to recover and stay recovered if allowed to eat a lot and quickly. Like Milamonster said, this might work for people with minimal metabolic damage. But for ED people, it just sounds like quasi-recovery and putting off the inevitable.
I don’t know if I made a real opinion to disagree with :) mostly just talking and thinking here. Yes for someone who can’t take it mentally, his refeeding technique would be insanity.
So far there has been focus on the refeeding part but I was thinking more about the whole philosophy, particularly the weight loss and maintenence. It seems pretty rational and about as safe as you can get really trying to lose weight. He’s stressing having a good metabolism first and recovering any loss afterwards, and keeping your metabolism as high as possible by getting your body burning through as many calories in a day as you can.
He also stressed losing on as many calories as you can and losing slowly, no more than 1% of bodyweight per week.
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