Why the priming phase is necessary in your nutrition plan
What the diet before the diet means, it is priming your metabolism and getting you ready to be in a deficit.
So I have a ton of ladies coming to me that are severely under-eating, and we can't take them into a deficit immediately. So when they come to me, you know, they want to lose weight, and that's their first initial thing. And when I say, "Hey, we need to eat more food", it's probably a little bit hard for them to buy-in, and trust me through the process. But once they've gone through the process, they're like, "Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for taking me through this and helping me eat more and really blessed my body with food".
So what that looks like is is we take their initial tracking, we compare it to what their predicted maintenance calories would be. So most of the time, I will take them to their maintenance calories and refigure their macronutrients, because 95% of the women clients that are coming to me are severely under-eating on protein. So we're going to see body comp position changes just from that.
Sometimes I have some women coming to me that maybe are eating enough food, but they're still not eating enough protein. So switching up their macronutrient ratio, and just leaving them there at their maintenance calories, they see changes from that and their body composition as well. So we don't have to immediately go into low, low calories to see changes in our body, we really need to prime our metabolism and get our metabolism ready to safely diet and have long term success.
What happens when we go directly into a diet from those low calories, is we're going to plateau, we're going to be hungry, we're probably going to start binge eating. And then we see that yo-yo dieting, we maybe lose a little bit we plateau And then we say, hey, this isn't working anymore. We eat all the food. And then that happens over a lifetime. We start putting on five to 10 pounds every year. We don't want to do that. We want to have the diet before the diet, the priming phase.
The Priming Phase is something I do with every single one of my clients, we prime your metabolism and get you ready and set up for a diet. I don't believe in directly taking you into a deficit, I want to make sure we're in a good spot. And I want to make sure from day to day that you can be adherent and consistent with your maintenance level macronutrient prescription that I give you. So that's a good base to start from, we really want to make sure that we prime your metabolism. Another thing is, is when we go into a deficit and we're at really low calories, we started to mess with our hormones, our thyroid, testosterone, leptin, ghrelin, all of those hormones are going to help decide whether we lose us or not. So we want to make sure that we are in a good spot with our metabolism. Our hormones are in a good spot mentally, physically, we're ready to go into a diet before we start that diet.
This plan is going to give us long term success in dieting and getting to and reaching and keeping those goals that we've set.
I really hope this helps you understand what the diet before the diet is. We need to prime our metabolism and get ready for the diet. We don't always need to go right into a deficit.
Questions email me anytime! @ lindsaysaenz97@gmail.com
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The Author
Lindsay Saenz, NFPA-CPT, NCIL1, PN1, NCIL2, is a personal health/life coach and the owner and creator of The M4 Method 4 Moms, the Momstrong365 movement for moms/women helping with nutrition and fitness guidance. Owner of LS Fitness and Beauty LLC, www.lindsaysaenz.com