07/19/2023
6.4 weeks until takes the stage at , her 2nd national show. This is just her 2nd full season, and already had a top 5 placing at Nationals last December, all without any PEDs or HRT. I decided to run the numbers to see how her rate of weight loss compares to her 2 other preps. And as always, rate of weight loss is basically the same. In fact, it’s slightly faster this prep, with LESS cardio!
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Some details for any fellow nerds out there:
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1. While .7 to .9 lbs weight loss per week might not sound appealing, it’s EXACTLY what you would want as a PED/HRT free competitor. We’d see muscle loss if we went much faster.
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2. Lbs lost was determined by deducting the 7 day rolling average end weight from the 7 day rolling average start weight. This way we were able to avoid potentially comparing a single day where the scale may have been temporarily up to a single day where it may have been temporarily down.
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3. We counted her weekly cheat meal days as +300 calories over her daily calorie target, since that’s how I prescribed them for her. She does everything I tell her, because she likes winning hehe. We counted her refeed day calories in the total as well…everything is accounted for.
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4. She doesn’t track steps! A lot of my clients do, but she doesn’t, because we’ve never needed to. This is significant in the sense that it means we haven’t done anything to ‘artificially’ offset any down-regulation/reduction in NEAT/energy constraint/etc. So if any significant metabolic adaptation were going to occur, we’d be able to see it, because we’re not attempting to offset it with more activity. This is a good choice for someone with a fast metabolism (because she moves a lot) like Nicole. If we did the generic ‘increase your step count because your NEAT is going to drop’, but her NEAT DIDN’T drop, she’d end up in a much larger deficit than we would want (remember all the individual variability in the NEAT studies…some people’s NEAT doesn’t drop much if at all in a deficit).
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5. Each post-comp period we more or less brought calories straight back up to her highest prior intake, and cardio straight back down to pre-cut levels. First post-comp I was a tad more conservative…we initially only bumped them up from 1725 to 2150. We quickly decided she needed more, so we went to 2600 after the first couple weeks post-comp. And then 2750, and eventually back down to 2600. We then knew that we should go straight to 2600 for future post-comps, so that’s what we did. Rate of weight regain for a given calories consumed was basically the same for both post-comp periods, and we expect that to be the case this upcoming post-comp as well (why wouldn’t it be?).
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6. I’m not surprised by any of this lol…any time I have a client who is consistent/regimented/precise enough that we can do this type of number crunching, this is essentially what we see. I DO NOT think we would see this if we took the more common approach of reverse dieting/gradually increasing calories/decreasing cardio post-diet, unless we treated it as a separate ‘health phase’, and then ALSO had our usual few months of higher cals/building on top of that. But that would mean competing far less often, and as you can see, it’s just not necessary.
