I really love my job. It never gets old. I love helping people, I love the personal connections that I make everyday and I love that I am constantly learning. Working with weight loss clients makes it even more interesting. Everyone is different in terms of what their body needs and everyone’s weight loss journey is different at different stages. It really amazes me. We are lucky enough to have metabolic testing at my gym that helps take the guesswork out of assessing what a client needs to reach their goals. We have a VO2max machine, and it is seriously awesome. We also have Kyle Radaker, who along with Amanda is a mentor of mine. He is the metabolic testing guru, and is a huge resource for both me and my clients.
I’ve been through the test 3 times now, and it is amazing what I’ve learned about my body, what it needs and what it is going through. Lately, I’ve been sending my clients to Kyle for metabolic testing before I start to work with them. My husband, Miles did his metabolic assessment recently and was a good sport to let me take pictures of him so I can explain what it is all about. Thes test has two parts, the first part is the metabolic assessment and the second part is the cardiovascular assessment. For this post, I’m just going to focus on the first part of the test.
So, the first that you do is show up to the gym in a fasting state, so no eating or drinking after midnight the night before. You lay in a surprisingly comfortable chair and breath into a tube for about 15 minutes.
This finds your Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). This is how many calories your body burns at rest, and it’s the most important number for weight loss. It takes out the guesswork, the trial and error portion of a weight loss program. Everyone’s body is completely different, and by finding their RMR I can customize a nutrition program for each client. A nutrition program that WILL WORK. It turns it into a simple math equation. If you can find your RMR, you can know EXACTLY how many calories you need to eat in order to lose weight. It also tells you how many calories you need to eat in order to not UNDER EAT. This was a really hard thing for me to wrap my head around. Throughout my entire life, I always thought the less you eat, the more you will lose…ummm, not even close. Undereating can be just as bad as overeating. Especially for those of us who work out a lot. By undereating, you body goes into survival mode. It starts to burn muscle and store fat…yes, STORE FAT! How sad is that? So the muscle that you are working hard for is getting burned away and the fat that you are trying to get rid of is there to stay!!!!
The test is beneficially to everyone, not just weight loss clients. For instance, Miles’ RMR was pretty eye opening. As you know, he also lost 50 pounds. When he was in weight loss mode, he cut his calories significantly and adopted a clean eating, healthy lifestyle. He got used to eating that amount of food, and once he went into maintenance mode, he never really got around to adding calories back in. Now he’s an amazing endurance athlete and does about 6 days a week of cardio in addition to a strength training program. What we learned from his RMR is that his metabolism is SUPER slow from undereating. On the cardiovascular portion of the test, he was off the charts. Kyle compared it to putting cheap gas into a Ferrari, and told him to increase his daily calories intake by 500-600 calories per day. (Poor thing, right?) By undereating, Miles was burning off the muscle that he was building. In less than 2 weeks, I can see a significant difference in his body. Small tweaks to your diet can make a big impact, and this is something that he would never have done without going through the test.
