So this is my first post here and I thought I would share a little about my journey and how I ended up here. I'm loving this community and everything I've been reading about metabolism, TDEE, etc. I actually landed here with a google search, after reading Matt Stone's various works on raising metabolic rate and function, and that whole can of worms. I know the two philosophies are a bit different, but apparently similar enough for google.

So, I am a 26 year old female with a moderately active, farm-based lifestyle. I have struggled with my weight (mostly the numbers on the scale) for years and years now. I have done every kind of diet you can name, from experiments with raw veganism, low carb, very low carb, paleo, intermittent fasting, etc. It was actually the intermittent fasting (IF) that was the last straw, pushing me here to the land of actually EATING FOOD. I did IF for about 6 months, with a daily 14+ hour fast and eating a big meal in the evening. I ended up gaining a few pounds much to my chagrin, but most significantly, my health completely crashed. My metabolism tanked, my energy plummeted, my blood pressure went sky high (first time that’s ever happened to me), my libido disappeared, I completely lost my appetite and started to seriously consider not eating for 3 or 4 days at a time (which I now know was likely a result of a cortisol-induced "high" from my poor body's stress response to starvation), and I became a total emotional lunatic. Oh, and I had a 2nd trimester miscarriage, while my midwife was telling me to eat even less to “get some of that weight off” during my pregnancy. Lovely! Over the past 10 years or so, I have generally eaten no more than about 1200 calories a day, with some major binges interspersed throughout. Eating so little wasn't intentional on my part. I just didn't have an appetite, and had to force myself to eat. I’ve also watched over the past 10 years as my hard muscles turned squishy, and my body fat seemed to become more obvious and fluffy.

Now, after doing an awful lot of research and reading a few books cover to cover, I realized that I had been starving myself for years, and cannibalizing lean mass from my body due to chronic undernutrition. For the past 4-6 weeks, I have been doing a metabolism reset and making a concerted effort to eat a lot more (my TDEE is somewhere around 3500+ calories, and here I was only eating 1200 on a good day, more like 800 calories a day, most of the time). Guess what? I initially gained about 10 pounds (which felt like bloated water retention), but now the weight gain has stopped and is now gradually coming back down, along with a 1% decrease in body fat percentage so far and a pretty spectacular re-emergence of my previously lost strength and endurance, with no effort on my part. And my leg muscles are starting to pop again. Haven’t seen those guys in awhile! I've literally been eating like a fiend every day, sleeping 10 hours per night, and losing body fat. Who knew?!

I've also discovered an interesting thing in this process that has radically altered my perception of myself. I grew up being told by well-meaning family members that I needed to aim for a weight of about 135 at my 5'4" height, and I believed them! After all, the BMI chart at the doctor’s office validated those ideas, so they MUST be right! Right? This constant heckling is actually the reason I started crash dieting and starving myself in my teens. I spent years looking for that magical number on the scale, while my body actually tends to rebound and hover right around 220 lbs, no matter what abuse I put myself through. When I learned about metabolic function and eating to TDEE/BMR, I decided to have my body fat percentage accurately measured, and what I learned pretty much stunned me. At 5'4", I have 180 lbs of lean body mass, and at my current 240 lbs, I am only carrying 27.3% body fat. My ideal weight reading came back as 216 lbs, which, if I keep my lean body mass, would put me at a perfectly healthy body fat percentage somewhere around 20%. (In the past when I was down around 215-220 lbs, I was a size 10 with bulging biceps and legs like a race horse).

I have always been damned strong, and pretty fit. I can hike a solid 6-8 miles on rough mountain terrain before I start to feel it, and I have always been able to do heavy farm work usually reserved for the guys, but I had never stopped to consider those things in light of my actual body composition. I just trusted what people told me, and berated myself for not being thin enough. I simply believed that because I saw numbers on the scale that didn't say "135" or thereabouts, that I was functionally obese, destined for a life of heart disease and diabetes. I thought I needed to lose 100 lbs to be healthy, which is a daunting and terrifying thought to face, and frankly made me so depressed and down on myself, I didn’t even feel like I should try anymore.

In the past, one of my most “successful” low carb/starvation crash diets knocked me down to a 187 lb size 8. Everybody thought I looked great, but I was so weak and tired, looking “great” didn’t seem very important anymore. Now I know I only need to face down a 20 lb weight loss, knock my body fat percentage down another 6 percentage points, and focus on eating enough calories and doing some strength training to preserve my lean mass and get some more definition happening. That seems do-able, and I’m getting excited about health and fitness again, for the first time in a long time.

I recently sat my well-meaning family members down and explained my findings concerning my actual body fat percentage and ideal weight, with the hope that they would be more supportive and less judgmental in the future. One of the first comments was, “Well, there must be some way to take 60 or 70 lbs of lean body mass off, isn’t there? You don’t want to be “big” forever, sweetheart.” WHAT?!!! I said, “Oh yes, I could take 60 lbs of lean mass off by cannibalizing heart tissue and calcium from my bones.” Social pressure is a seriously big thing to overcome, I’m starting to learn.

I’m also getting super excited about hitting the weights again, now that I know I have the body type to really see results from heavy lifting. I used to be pretty passionate about lifting, but I stopped after my good-looking ex-Olympic-qualified male personal trainer pulled me aside one day and, in hushed tones conveying embarrassment for me, told me that I’d better stop lifting so heavy because I was “bulking like a man, with shoulders like a football player, and that’s not attractive.” Instead, I was supposed to do “high reps, low weight, and get down to a pretty and petite size 4”. I was crushed, and dropped my gym membership that day, even though I was happily out-lifting many of the guys and all of the other women in the gym. Back then, I could do 450 lb leg presses for days, and bench my own weight after only a couple of months of training.

Now I know that “bulking” is what’s going to happen to me. Those are my genes. And that a “pretty and petite size 4” is not in the stars for my future. A strong and badass 215 lb size 10 is more like it! I’m even thinking about training for some power lifting events in the future, which is a pretty big leap, considering a few months ago I was sitting around the house, starving, unmotivated, exhausted, cranky, and feeling like my life was bound to spiral into morbid obesity and early death.

Without this community, and the ideas I've picked up from you guys, and the tools provided in some of these posts, I would still be stuck in self-loathing, misinformed, dietary hell. Now, my energy is freed up for more important things like...you know....life.