So the big bowl of spaghetti - did it make you feel tired afterwards?
Reason I ask is I'm trying to get an idea of your insulin insensitivity.
There are degrees of problems. In the early stages, its direct - hunger, lipid building and storage, weight gain.
Over time, immune problems (allergies), vitamin deficiencies, depression, and lethargy, as fatty acid metabolism, as well as glucose metabolism become incrementally impaired.
You've got everything you need...now you have to tighten down on insulin sensitivity. Aerobic exercise, and more limited use of starchy carbs and more reliance on complex carbs, the fiberous type, to help fuel you.
If you're not journalling your diet and calorie intake, you need to start (I think you're already doing this) and you'll have to start pushing your metabolism a bit harder - because as your weight declined, so did the ease at which calorie deficit and exercise work for melting off weight.
Typically, you see plateaus as the body drops from more than 30 to 20 percent or less, and then again at 15 and about 10 percent body fat.
For you, 10 percent may be a real hassle to get to, and just might not suit you. You see, its a number to you right now - much touted, and believed to have magical powers. In fact, you can look very good at 12 percent. Even at 15 percent, its not like you're going to have love handles and a fat ass.
You want to make a GRADUAL transitions to a leaner body mass...and heres the key. You want to slowly tighten down on energy metabolism. At the one end, you improve glucose uptake and utilization, storage as glycogen and at the same time, you slowly improve fatty acid metabolism. You switch between them all the time, but as you're dropping in fat mass, you have this complex set of signals going back and forth between liver, pancreas, thyroid, muscle cells, fat cells and brain. We aim to induce the optimal signaling with some of the excess insulin to promote muscle gains. Those muscles, in turn, we encourage to burn fatty acids efficiently.
Everybody (your hormone/metabolic systems) have to come back on line and be functioning just right to get you down to that magical 10 percent body fat mass.
So we're going to focus on insulin management. That means not carb cycling, but more like carb wiggling, from very low starchy mid-GI carbs to a tantalizing feed to restore used glycogen, and only after exercise, not before.
Next, you have to realize that muscle burns calories best. As your body mass dropped, the number of cals burned just moving around has dropped as well. Now you need to build muscle as you lose more fat. You may, in fact, not want to loose much more muscle, just fat....so we aim for a replacement, one to one, of fat mass for muscle mass. And we do this slowly - because we must also produce a certaim mass of support tissue for the new muscle mass. You work to gain muscle, and as you do, you will burn fat more efficiently, and at the same time, take up, use, and store glucose more efficiently.
Does this make sense?
Please take a new picture and post it for your avvy.
"Durring my low calories I was going 6 days a week performing moderatley intese walking for 30 minutes after each workout and for the high calorie weeks I did a 4 day on and 1 day off split with the same cardio."
Now, you are going to go to whole body workouts, every other day, 45 min to one hour, and to HITT cardio, every other day. And you need walks, once per day, 30 min, moderate pace, first thing in the morning. These walk are strictly to build up aerobic capacity, and something we call anaerobic threshold value. We do this by breathing correctly and reducing cortisol by this breathing. I will talk about this later.
If you have a stressful life, again walk in the evening. This time, for 20 min, at a moderate pace, paying attention to your breathing, and dumping all worries from your mind. Best bet is to find a dog to walk.
You walk every day, day in and day out. You must also regulate sleep. This means, in bed at 10 and up at 5 or 6. No late nights in front of the computer or TV. Stimulants are used sparingly at best. Green tea, water, no pop, no coffee. I hope you do not use tabacco.
We are going to take your weight off and we are going to fine tune your thyroid (with supplements and diet) and liver (with diet and stress control), pushing them back to normal function. As they come one line in normal function, your insulin sensitivity will improve dramatically, and you'll *slowly* be able to accomodate more starchy carbs, again, always during the most metabolically active portion of the day in the company of fiberous carbs, and only after your weight training or HITT cardio.
We will now tune your weight training to make it more metabolically active for fat burning as well. This means you move away from the more standard training methods (low reps, higher resistance).
We must also start to use smart fats. These will help fine tune your liver and thyroid function as well, and improve sleep, reduce anxiety and also help immune function.
Does all this make sense?
(I guess thats productive)
ok makes sense now. I couldnt imagine someone doing 15sec sprint/45sec low for 20mins right off the bat. 