"Metabolic Damage"

An acquaintance of mine used the HCG diet to lose about 100lbs, but she rapidly gained it all back, plus some. She has quit the program but now she has found she can no longer lose weight normally; despite exercising and eating at a moderate deficit, she says the scale just won't move. Her doctor has pretty much written her off, as "you made your bed, now lay in," and hasn't given her any advice.She knows I lost weight the 'old fashioned way' and has asked for my input. This issue is far beyond my current knowledge, but it is good to read of someone who is coming back from it successfully. It makes me think she should just keep plodding away and doing it the way she is now and that she will eventually see success again. EIther that or take a full diet break for a while and give her body a rest?

Any doctor who "pretty much writes you off" should not be a doctor. She needs to find one who treats her with respect.

That said, were I in her position, I would calculate my BMR and TDEE, and eat my TDEE (plus eat back exercise calories) for a few weeks. Any gains or losses will allow her to tweak these numbers. Then I'd eat at a sensible deficit to lose the weight I wanted to lose.

Metabolic damage is really a misnomer. Yes you do slow down your metabolism and make it do bad things but Layne has been proven wrong on many levels. He has used biased study methods, has had his studies get poor reviews in peer review process.
I am not saying that Layne is a bad person or anything like that, he has helped many but there are many many many more people out there to learn from than that guy.

Whenever you go into ultra low calorie intake and ultra high calorie burn, your metabolism will literally say F#&K you and stop burning fat and actually store every single calorie you put into it because your body is built to survive. If you stay on that ultra low calorie diet for a long time like years, yes you will get really skinny, i.e. anorexia style skinny but otherwise in the short term your body will win the battle and you will actually get bigger vs. smaller.

Bios3training is a place to learn from, Icecreamfittness is another very great resource. Marc Lobliner of Tigerfitness gives excellent advice. (YouTube fitness channels)

If you are willing to put in the time and effort in the gym, you can virtually eat any type of food you want as long as your caloric intake is in a deficit and you will lose weight. I am living proof of that (yes that is anecdotal but it is still working. I bust my butt in the gym and eat whatever I like) Every week I go to the "fat doctor" weigh in and get my bodyfat done and every week I am down fat, up muscle, and bodyfat started 7 weeks ago at 28% and this week I am at 19.2%. I was stuck in neutral running their diet. Eating meat only with a few veg/fruit sprinkled in and ultra low calorie. 1200kcal or less a day, my body said NOPE we will not be losing weight like this. (I was working out too hard and so my metabolism went to survival mode. aka metabolic damage) As soon as I upped my calories, spread out my macros and added in the foods I like but with control, I began to see gains like I could never have hoped for otherwise.

People just need to take the decision and process of fat loss more seriously. There are many monumental decisions that we make in life - such as marriage, children and buying a home - which ought require extensive consideration. I believe fat loss to be up there with those. Unfortunately, this is a goal that most take too casually and end up making things far more difficult than need be with some rather undesirable consequences.

Within 24 hours, leptin serum concentration levels decrease upon restricting calories. This is how quickly and attune the body is at monitoring and responding to changes in energy balance. The longer one restricts, the more alterations occur and the further from baseline the values become. Of course, maintaining a severe deficit during this restrictive state will accelerate this decline at a faster rate.

When people reference a slowing down of the metabolism, a more accurate description is the body is becoming less proficient at using energy for the sake of conservation. In other words, your adjusted TDEE lessens to save energy as a result of chronic restriction. Thus, for example, your RMR demands less energy and you burn less calories from exercise. Your body doesn't consider what you're doing as a diet - it views it as the beginning of a famine and will try to protect itself. It will do so by two principle methods: reducing energy expenditure and returning to a certain 'set weight" during refeeds following rapid weight loss.

If one researches scholarly studies on VLCD that assessed changes in RMR/TDEE, LBM, as well as metabolic hormones such as leptin and ghrelin (and they're respective receptors), you'll notice significant alterations from baseline. These adaptations are not only responsible for obesity relapse in previously obese persons and recovering anorexics, but also why future fat loss interventions become more difficult and unsuccessful. Although there are few long-term studies on the subject, the lingering effects of these adaptations can persist for years.

Metabolic damage is really a misnomer. Yes you do slow down your metabolism and make it do bad things but Layne has been proven wrong on many levels. He has used biased study methods, has had his studies get poor reviews in peer review process.
I am not saying that Layne is a bad person or anything like that, he has helped many but there are many many many more people out there to learn from than that guy.

Whenever you go into ultra low calorie intake and ultra high calorie burn, your metabolism will literally say F#&K you and stop burning fat and actually store every single calorie you put into it because your body is built to survive. If you stay on that ultra low calorie diet for a long time like years, yes you will get really skinny, i.e. anorexia style skinny but otherwise in the short term your body will win the battle and you will actually get bigger vs. smaller.

Bios3training is a place to learn from, Icecreamfittness is another very great resource. Marc Lobliner of Tigerfitness gives excellent advice. (YouTube fitness channels)

If you are willing to put in the time and effort in the gym, you can virtually eat any type of food you want as long as your caloric intake is in a deficit and you will lose weight. I am living proof of that (yes that is anecdotal but it is still working. I bust my butt in the gym and eat whatever I like) Every week I go to the "fat doctor" weigh in and get my bodyfat done and every week I am down fat, up muscle, and bodyfat started 7 weeks ago at 28% and this week I am at 19.2%. I was stuck in neutral running their diet. Eating meat only with a few veg/fruit sprinkled in and ultra low calorie. 1200kcal or less a day, my body said NOPE we will not be losing weight like this. (I was working out too hard and so my metabolism went to survival mode. aka metabolic damage) As soon as I upped my calories, spread out my macros and added in the foods I like but with control, I began to see gains like I could never have hoped for otherwise.

If you're going to make the assertion that Layne is wrong please do reference the specific claims that you disagree with and why. It's not useful to provide an empty critique.

layne is supposed to be a scientist yet when he brought up metabolic damage he offered no scientific data. he offered broscience.

IT doesn't mean anything? How about it's a descriptor of what occurs in the body when it determines that self-preservation is at risk.

If you haven't guessed, I wholly agree with Layne Norton and have experienced it myself. At 11-13% bodyfat I was running maybe 70miles a week and lifting, I looked great and I was a mess hormonally, physically, and emotionally. I was eating ~2000-2300 calories a day despite "burning" well over 3000 each day but I was simply maintaining. Any time I'd eat what one would estimate my TDEE at I would gain weight FAST. Real weight, not water weight or a temporary fluctuation. I decreased my workouts to what they should be--maybe an hour or so a day--and quickly gained ~20 pounds in 9 weeks. At the same time I was eating ~2000-2300 calories a day so MAYBE a surplus of 300 calories a day on average--certainly not 1000+ extra calories a day; however, my body simply FREAKED OUT! I have also gone through recovery from anorexia--at which time I gained from 68 pounds up to 95 pounds all by eating 1200-1700 calories a day (and doing some daily exercise). I've done enough research and lived at the extreme where self-preservation is a real risk. I can say without doubt that "metabolic damage" is real and I don't care what anyone chooses to call it. Semantics and technicalities are a way to avoid the underlying message which is quite real and true.

IT doesn't mean anything? How about it's a descriptor of what occurs in the body when it determines that self-preservation is at risk.

If you haven't guessed, I wholly agree with Layne Norton and have experienced it myself. At 11-13% bodyfat I was running maybe 70miles a week and lifting, I looked great and I was a mess hormonally, physically, and emotionally. I was eating ~2000-2300 calories a day despite "burning" well over 3000 each day but I was simply maintaining. Any time I'd eat what one would estimate my TDEE at I would gain weight FAST. Real weight, not water weight or a temporary fluctuation. I decreased my workouts to what they should be--maybe an hour or so a day--and quickly gained ~20 pounds in 9 weeks. At the same time I was eating ~2000-2300 calories a day so MAYBE a surplus of 300 calories a day on average--certainly not 1000+ extra calories a day; however, my body simply FREAKED OUT! I have also gone through recovery from anorexia--at which time I gained from 68 pounds up to 95 pounds all by eating 1200-1700 calories a day (and doing some daily exercise). I've done enough research and lived at the extreme where self-preservation is a real risk. I can say without doubt that "metabolic damage" is real and I don't care what anyone chooses to call it. Semantics and technicalities are a way to avoid the underlying message which is quite real and true.

I am not saying that Layne is right or wrong....I don't care.

My view on this is that the metabolism is not damaged...
If you are alive and breathing, then you are "metabloising" something...
When you are dead, you can say that the metabolism is damaged.

If you cut calories, then your body is going to react in a way that preserves itself....no different than a pregnant woman who cuts way back on her caloric intake in order to stay "skinny".....she can do that all she wants, but she will suffer while the body does things to protect the fetus.

Obviously this is a personal experience for you, so my intent is not to offend you.

But I don't think damage is the right word.....
Has the metabolism slowed down?? Yes, very much so.
Will it take time to get it going yes?? Yes. It will.
Will it get back to where it is working as desired?? Most likely yes.
Is that damage? To me no, it is working how it was intended to work. It works to preserve the life.

Your body has amazing coping mechanisms......so when you screw things up, it will take time to get it working right again.
But I don't see it as "damage", I see it as how God (or nature, your choice) intended.