The Naturale Yogi

It’s January 2021 and it’s been 11 months since most of the world went on lockdown due to the still existing pandemic and it’s getting worse in some parts of the world where new variants are popping up that is supposed to be more contagious than the original variants that started this entire thing in December 2019. The reality is that a lot of people are now having to deal with the new normal in different ways, others have gone back to their offices with many restrictions in place to help lessen the transmission of the SARS CoV 2, but there are others like me who are still in a bubble and thus working from home has become the new normal. 

Working from home has its ups and downs but one major part of my life has been seeing improvement from this is my overall health. I’ve taken this opportunity to be able to control all my meals everyday and not be compromised due to unexpected work meetings or when it was still normal to go to parties and gatherings for birthdays or the Christmas and New Years celebrations. I have 100% control over all my meals for the last 11 months and keeping an eye on my intake has taught me a lot of things. At first I decided to sign up for a meal planning program that gave me a really low 1,200 calorie count diet for the first month and I realized that at the time it was a welcome break from the high calorie diet I have been on the first 3 months of 2020 as I was traveling a lot for weddings and some other things happened that I was unable to really watch my intake as I wasn’t home most of the time. After 1 month of that I was given 1,500 calories the next month and it was still doable until the third month when I was given a 1,300 calorie plan and that’s when things felt unsustainable but I tried my best to keep with it as I was still seeing scale weight loss and my body measurements were improving. Fast forward to 4, 5, and 6 months in where the plan was just slightly changed to accommodate other types of food but where the calorie count stayed at the 1,200 to 1,300 range, it was already impossible to follow it as my body was screaming with hunger all the time. What found odd about the plan was that it did not at all prioritize training therefore there was no emphasis in trying to keep muscle on the body but instead just cutting and cutting and cutting more calories.

Eventually I stopped following the plan (as it was no longer sustainable for me) and decided to go a different route, one that I have been watching about on Youtube and that was Smalletics, a program that catered to petite women off 5’4” and below of which demographic I belonged to. The main pillars of this program was to focus on building muscle while only tweaking the types of food you were eating but not drastically lowering your calorie intake AKA “dieting”. Remember that before I started on the meal plan program I was on I was probably eating around 2,500 to 3,000 calories per day and when I switched and did a month of eating 1,200 calories per day of course my body released a lot of the water weight that I was holding on to but I doubt that I lost any fat. It was like going on a fast for a month after 2 months of bingeing. I remembered exactly why I thought the meal plans were not working for me anymore was because when I asked if eating at 1,200 was too low they told me that it was not at all too low for my height but we all know that 1,200 is no where near where any adult should be eating. The suggested calories for the Petite Power Program was the average of 3 days of whatever you are currently eating and if you have only been eating 1,200 calories of less the Program suggests going on a reverse diet and getting your calories back up as this means your metabolism would have the time to go back up because being able to eat 2,000 calories means you have a higher metabolism and dieting by eating only 1,200 calories means that you are forcing your metabolism to slow down. I won’t get into the details of this but there are a lot of articles and videos on this topic so it’s better to get that information first hand from those who are experts on this. 

So this is what I did on December of 2020 and I found out that my metabolism was in fact at around 1,700 to 1,900 calories per day. It took me two months to get my metabolism back up from 1,200 to 1,700 in that time I still tracked my macros and calories but I ate until I was really satiated, not bursting at my pants full but enough that I wasn’t eating everything I saw in front of me. I started the Petite Power Training program with progressive overload at the same time and I’m 7 weeks into it. I have 5 more weeks to go and I’m seeing improvements in my eating habits. I no longer worry about food and pretty much eat until I’m satisfied and even if I don’t prepare my meals before hand I pretty much can go with my intuition even if I still weigh my food as I always have my scale beside me when I pick things up for meals onto my plate. I’m not so much looking at my body composition yet because I wanted to focus on getting my metabolism in control first so after this 8th week I would focus more on the training aspect of the program and probably focus more on progressive overload in the last 4 weeks of the program. I’m so happy that my metabolism has bounced back and that I now know where I really am at without having to weaken myself for a long time by in essence “fasting” on such a low calorie count for months at a time.