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“Metabolic Damage – How to HEAL Your “Broken Metabolism” | Diet Recovery

Are you suffering from a slow or broken metabolism and metabolic damage after dieting and wondering how to properly fix it and increase the metabolism?

And have you been wondering to yourself any of the following:

✦ is my metabolism slow and if so, why did my metabolism slow down and how to speed up slow metabolism after dieting

✦ Do I have a damaged metabolism?

✦ what to eat to boost, heal and are for better metabolism?

✦ how to fix and repair my metabolism (metabolic damage) after yo-yo dieting or an eating disorder?

✦ Am I in starvation mode? how do I get my body out of starvation mode?

✦ how to reset female & male metabolism?

✦ what are the damaged and very slow metabolism symptoms?

✦ should I do reverse dieting? Intermittent fasting? Another Meal Plan? Will OMAD, KETO, 1200 calories, Cardio, and other things slow the metabolism?

✦ Can a slow metabolism cause digestion, bloating, hair loss, acne, constipation, weight gain, pros / hormonal irregularities and obesity?

...Then you're in the right place!

In this article we're going over what it means to have a slow, broken or damaged metabolism, very slow metabolic rate symptoms and how to fix it.

So don't worry, if you feel like your metabolism is doomed, it’s broken, it’s damaged forever, or that you have metabolic damage and you’re afraid it’s too late to fix...

You’re not alone in feeling this, but also, you can heal the metabolism and get it back to working full speed.

And it’s not just your metabolism either, apart of your metabolism is also your hormones, so your thyroid, and reproductive hormones, that slowly go down and may shut off altogether, as well as we'll discuss.

Keep reading to find out more on how to fix and heal your metabolism for long term sustainability!

 


 

SIGNS OF A SLOW METABOLISM:

First let's go over some of the common slow metabolic rate symptoms and what happens when the metabolism is slow.

Check the boxes that apply to you:

▢ dysregulated hunger: strong appetite, strong cravings for carbs and/or fats, wake up hungry throughout night or lack of hunger in the morning OR low to non-existent appetite

▢ are you wanting to eat more, and/or continuing to think about food, even when you just ate and feel 'physically' full? 

▢ dry, dull, slow growing hair / hair falling out or thinning 

▢ cracked, dry, slow growing fingernails / dry, dull skin

▢ unbalanced hormones - decreased / low sex drive, suppressed fertility, vaginal dryness / erectile dysfunction, irregular or absent period

▢ gassy / bloating after eating, gastroparesis (food sitting in your stomach for hours)

▢ inability to sleep soundly through the night without waking up, waking up at around 2-4am / waking up feeling "tired but wired"

▢ unstable moods, fluctuating irritability, anxiety and depression

▢ low body temperature, feeling cold all the time, cold hands, feet & nose / body temperature less than 98.7 degrees all day and less than 97.8 upon waking 

▢ constipation, slow moving bowels or diarrhea 

▢ frequent urination during day (more than once every 4 hours) / being woken up to pee during the night 

▢ excessive thirst and dry mouth

▢ poor mental focus, concentration and brain fog

unsteady energy - chronic fatigue, lethargic, no desire for physical activity, afternoon crash

▢ easy to gain weight & retain water 

▢ multiple food allergies, intolerances and hypersensitivities 

▢ you've been in a caloric deficit or you consistently don't eat to satisfaction (or fullness) at meals 

If you've checked one or multiple of these boxes, then you'll want to keep reading about what's happened to your metabolism and what to do to fix, heal and restore your metabolism.

Want to learn more?

Be sure to get your free copy of The Metabolic-Mind Connection Test, to get a further look into signs and symptoms of a slow metabolism, if you're food obsessed brain (think: feeling hungry and always craving something?) and what to do to recover your metabolism, by clicking below:

 

 

THE TRUTH ABOUT A SLUGGISH METABOLISM 

So the question is, how can you speed up a slow metabolism?

Well, know, that if you’re experiencing a lowered metabolism or what you think as a “broken” metabolism, fearing that your case is unique in that you’ve ruined your body forever…

...what’s going on in your body has adapted.

Your metabolism has adapted to whatever you’ve been putting it through via food restriction and/or excessive exercise, for the past months or even years.

Fortunately, you can fix this, and in this article (or watch the video below), we’re going to go over what’s happening to your metabolism and how you can fix your metabolism.

And as your metabolism rises and heals, your hormones will also regulate, stabilize and heal as the metabolism and hormone production are intertwined.

All systems will begin to function properly as the body comes out of a state of malnourishment from restricting eating and into more of a balance (that still fluctuates)! 

First, you must understand that, every time we go for a long period of time:

  • on a diet, restrictive eating plan or we restrict ourselves of foods in any way [and I mean all the low-calorie diets, skipping meals, diets that cut whole food groups or macronutrients such as carbs, fats, protein, gluten, dairy, sugar – things like these]
  • or you have the mental obsession around food, so you're always thinking about food and face extreme guilt, fear, anxiety, or shame around eating and your body,
  • or you over-exercise and go on excessive exercise regimes that exhaust you
  • or purge [via the mouth, laxatives/enemas, and exercise purging (to "earn" or "burn" calories]
  • any / all these stressful types of lifestyles we embark on whether to lose weight or to get healthy

…we end up lowering our metabolism as a result.

The metabolism adapts.

So when we finally eat a bit more [for example: we typically get very hungry and binge at some point during a restrictive diet, "fall off the wagon" etc], each time we eat more and allow our body to rest from being exhausted and burnt out...

...our body then holds on to everything it can (as fat and water) as the this triggers the body to go into survival mode, as an attempt to try to conserve energy for what the body perceives as a prolonged threat of starvation, famine, or energy deficit and too much energy expenditure (excessive exercise).

 

THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU OR YOUR BODY...

Your body is not here to mess with you.

Your body doesn’t want to gain a bunch of weight for no reason, just like you don't...

The body is on your team and working to survive and thrive.

So the body does what it’s biology is designed to do after starvation bouts (whether real starvation or not, this is what your body perceives a diet as - semi-starvation).

If you’re coming from this place of restrictive eating and/or excessive exercise, pretty much all you need right now — is to eat!

And it would be best if you ate, a lot. 

You need to feed your body and nourish your body to get your metabolism to rise again to trigger your body back out of the survival response of starvation mode.

Your body needs to sense that it is having an abundance of nutritional energy coming and coming in consistently, which therefore allows for the body to slowly begin to raise the metabolism again.

This process is called - diet recovery, or restrictive eating recovery.

You need to:

  • gain some healthy and healing weight.
  • rest, a lot.
  • eat a lot of food and more variety of foods.
  • get past all the fear foods and issues with gaining weight.
  • not cut salt anymore
  • not cut oil or starchy carbs or saturated fats
  • not drink gallons of water a day.
  • You need to have a balance of all macronutrients and as much as your body is asking for (carbs/fats/proteins).
  • It would help if you got back to living a normal life based on experiences, not based around food and your body looking perfect.
  • You need to embark on a self-love and self-acceptance journey and find all that you can to heal this unhealthy relationship with food and your body.

 

CARDIO AND THE METABOLISM

If you’re someone who diets and eats a very low amount of calories and/or macros and you spend most of your time on the elliptical, treadmill, long distance running or cycling, doing miles and miles every day

(or doing hours and hours of cardio in some way daily...)

..and you can’t seem to lose any more weight, or you feel your metabolism is low, well, this is a very common metabolic response to excessive cardio.

the metabolism will adapt by lowering metabolic processes, reproductive and thyroid hormone production, digestive enzymes, and so forth.

 

 

 

You should highly consider and strive to back off the heavy amounts of cardio if you want to support your metabolism.

 

MINDSET + CARDIO + METABOLISM

Hours and hours of endless cardio can suppress and lower the metabolism, especially when the mindset of guilt or shame is driving it.

An example of guilt mindsets are you may think:

“I need to do this cardio to earn my calories to be able to eat”

“I have to exercise to purge the calories I ate last night because I feel so guilty and bad for eating so unhealthy” 

"I have to get in 10k steps today even though I'm exhausted / sick / on my period / injured / etc"

“I have to exercise even though I hate the treadmill because I don’t want to gain weight because I hate my body”

 

These habitual thoughts can be just as harmful as a physical restriction or starvation, keeping the body and brain stuck and unable to heal or balance out.

If you are extremely depleted of energy and have not spent a good while in a diet recovery process, aka:

  • you still haven’t got your period back or it's irregular and it's never consistent,
  • you still face extreme hunger all the time or regularly overeat or binge eat

 – you obviously should not be working out at all if you want to heal your metabolism.

You need to take a temporary break from exercise altogether or at least cut back to just light stretching – literally.

And rest for several months – and eat.

If you'd like a step-by-step guide to how to go through an exercise rehab process and thereafter reintegrate sustainable balanced body movement thereafter, be sure to check out my Find Your Balance Program.

 

 

REST & THE METABOLISM

Sleeping / Resting more is going to be critical in normalizing the metabolism.

Sleep as much as you can, even if you have a busy schedule.

Try anything and everything to go to bed earlier or sleep in as much and as often as you can.

Take naps if you can and if you really feel like you want a nap, make yourself a priority.

Sleep is essential for healing to take place, and all sorts of hormonal actions take place during REM sleep, so if you’re not sleeping sufficiently, you’re missing out on a critical factor in healing the metabolism.

 

 

REVERSE DIETING VS GOING ALL IN ON A DIET RECOVERY PROCESS TO HEAL THE METABOLISM?

It’s different for some people.

But overall I do not recommend reverse dieting to regulate extreme hunger and/or binge eating or the metabolism, which you can read more about in this post.

Some people when first starting out and this is totally new, often gravitate towards the  slow increase in their fear foods and in their overall caloric intake.

But it is absolutely miserable and torturous for them.

Other people actually do better and heal quicker if they just committed themselves to going all in on a diet recovery process and ate a lot of calories, to complete satiety, without slowly easing into it

(even if they’re so hungry that they get up to eating 10,000+ calories a day in their early diet or eating disorder recovery and nutritional rehabilitation phase, then so be it

Like myself and the men in the Minnesota starvation experiment, you can read more about this in my book damn the diets!)

 

 

SHOULD YOU TRACK CALORIES?

The people who go about the process more slowly tend to still track their calories, which most people cannot track calories/macros because they will get too obsessive, and they’re better off just eating to fullness and not tracking at all.

The people who do track would slowly track to make sure they’re eating ENOUGH carbs, fats, or portions...

Tracking calories for some people may be beneficial because for so long they’ve been in a restrictive mindset, and they need to be eating a lot more carbs and a lot more fats than they even think they should, so having calories to guide them back to eating ENOUGH in the beginning can be beneficial in this case.

But it should only be temporary with the goal to stop counting calories eventually.

Tracking the calories, in the beginning for SOME people, can be beneficial to show they indeed need to be eating more to:

  • broaden their horizon of what normal eating should look like,
  • to keep them on track,
  • to get their period back,
  • to get their hormones back,
  • to stop their hair from falling out,
  • to get their energy back,
  • to be able to sleep better again,
  • and obviously, to raise their metabolism

– this kind of stuff.

Again with the goal being to eventually not have to track anymore and instead eat when hungry and stop when full being able to sufficiently navigate their regulated hunger and satiety cues better as well as their mindset around eating and their body image heals along with the physical body to not skew/sabotage their eating habits. 

I don’t often recommend tracking or logging calories, but for some, it can work in the beginning for these reasons.

Typically, I would rather recommend not logging or tracking but just eyeballing things, so adding extra servings to what you normally would consume every day to get your calories up, and eating to satisfaction both physically and mentally.

You need to make sure you’re eating enough and eating consistently throughout the day, every day, at every single meal, or moving at the pace at which you feel comfortable enough, but also still challenging yourself to change – forever from here on out.

No calorie compensating, calorie purging, low-anything anymore or conscious efforts to skip meals or cut ingredients, and trying to be so strict. 

If you typically eat a couple of pieces of bread, a tablespoon of oil, or no salt, then you would add an extra piece or two of bread in addition to what you’re already eating, plus extra oil, plus adding salt to taste in your meals.

Slowly over time, this will help raise and heal the metabolism again to normal speed.

It’ll also help your body, eventually, after the body gains weight, heals and feels safe that the body won’t be starved, go back to your normal healthiest weight – effortlessly and naturally without you having to think about it or control it.

Yep, this can happen!

There will typically be a rebound effect even in recovery to gain some weight, but if you’re truly consistent without ANY restrictions, this is how you can break the cycle.

Eventually, you’ll raise the metabolism back up after the body feels safe again - safe it won't be in a famine, overtrained and underfed, so the body doesn’t have to conserve and hold on to the weight.

It DOES happen.

It will happen for you too.

You just have to be patient and consistent.

 

BINGE EATING & GAINING WEIGHT

As introduced earlier, through yo-yo dieting, every time we restrict or over exercise, our body instinctually lowers the metabolism to survive.

When we eat or binge to make up for the caloric and energy deficit (aka semi-starvation), we binge with a lowered metabolism [and often weakened digestion too].

Therefore, we gain weight because the metabolic rate is not normally functioning – but this, my friend, is simply a conservation mechanism!

To conserve, the metabolism lowers the rate as a result from the insufficient energy not coming in and also stores it as fat to conserve for the perceived threat that it will be starved again, and that this food you’re bingeing on won’t be consistent because your brain is full of guilt and is saying:

"I have to "make up" for this binge tomorrow"

“I’m so weak, I’m a failure for eating, I need to restrict! I need to purge! I’m going to gain weight! I need to cleanse and fast and diet this off!! I need to calorie compensate!”

So the body hears "we’re going to be starved again," so the body says:

“Let’s store all this fat so we don’t die, let’s keep the metabolism low or else we’ll burn energy too fast and therefore starve from insufficient energy and a lack of the foods we’re really needing to carry out cellular functioning, from coming in!”

The body and only the body can raise the metabolism again.
No, cleanse reboot, supplement, superfood, lemon water or special magic quick-fix technique and morning routine is going to re-set and ramp up your metabolism!

What will heal and bring the metabolism back to normal, though, is when the body feels safe that it is not going to be consistently starved, deprived, overtrained, depleted, and therefore stressed as a result – but instead feels safe.

 

How does the body begin to feel safe again? How does it develop this trust again?

By feeding your body when cued to, without guilting yourself for feeling super hungry or for having cravings, or for desiring "off-limit" foods.

There’s a reason your body is asking for those foods when you’re coming from a past of restriction, dieting, purging, overexercising, and an unhealthy relationship with your body, such as weight control for pure extreme vanity purposes and/or "weight loss=health" reasons.

 

Again, this can be a slow process, and for some, it may take a year or years, or for others, it may take a few months (which is not as common).

It depends on:

  • how long you’ve suppressed your metabolism in the past,
  • how much damage was done,
  • how many times you get stuck in a quasi-recovery and re-compromise the metabolism IN your diet recovery process
  • and how often your mind gets in the way trying to get you to go back and restrict every time you eat or gain some weight…

Have compassion for your body - your body has been in this state of constant stress and betrayal, not being fed consistently, overworked, and purging the calories that come in both orally and exercise purging.

 

 

 

 

SALT & THE METABOLISM

Another thing that will help support metabolic (and adrenal + digestive) health is increasing your salt – this is going to be crucial as well.

There are so many trends out there demonizing salt – whether it’s salt-free or low salt diets, raw vegan, SOS, or the bodybuilding clean eating diets – all ends of the anti-sodium spectrum...

...which I tried them all, and it only resulted in:

  • low body temperature to where I could never get warm
  • low blood pressure to where I was dizzy and faced vertigo all the time and sometimes fainted
  • electrolyte imbalance due to low sodium and too high water intake
  • fatigue and tiredness all the time, leading to adrenal fatigue
  • edema, puffiness, and water retention in the face, ankles, and all over any time I ate salt because my body – just like with the fat – would conserve the salt when it did get some. My body held onto sodium and water because it felt, (and it was), going to be deprived of salt again the next day when the cheat meal was over or when the diet started again.

Eventually, as my energy metabolism (food) balanced out, so did my metabolism of salt and water.

I no longer get swollen and puffy if I eat high sodium meals [which I typically eat high sodium meals daily]. 😉

I still don’t restrict salt. I eat sea salt, pink salt and even refined salt.

Increasing salt not only helped with all this but also with healing my overall metabolism and digestion.

 

WARMING FOODS & THE METABOLISM

Along with eating salt, is to eat more warming foods to feed the metabolic fire, such as calorically dense, not-so-water-rich foods.

When your metabolism is low, the high water-rich foods will be so hard to process and digest that the body will have a hard time with these foods – the water will essentially put out the fire. (the small little spark of a fire, at that!)

Instead focus on foods that are high in:

  • salt,
  • saturated fat,
  • starch,
  • sugar,

as Matt Stone says, all the "s’s" are great for raising the metabolism! Yum!

So: cheese and crackers, bread, ice cream, potato chips, pizza – these are all warming foods, and you’ll notice your metabolism rising (and ease on the bloating and digestive issues) when you’re consistently consuming these foods.

You can still eat fruit and veggies if you crave them but don’t have them making up the majority of your diet at this time, or chose lower water-rich fruits like dates or baked root veggies rather than steamed or raw foods – and cooked with salt and fats.

  

STRESS & THE METABOLISM

Obviously (or so I assume), as many people may know, reducing negative emotional/mental stress can also, in general, be helpful in all areas of your health, including the reversal of the suppression of your metabolism.

If your body is constantly putting out high cortisol and adrenaline levels, it’s going to be hard to raise the metabolism.

If you’re resting more and not over-exercising, if you’re stopping restrictive dieting and being neurotically stressed about strict clean eating, you’ll, in return, reduce the amount of stress you’ve been putting your body through for years as well.

Dieting, malnourishment, over-exercise are all super stressful on the body and psyche!

 But this also goes for other emotional and mental stressors in your life.

 

Signs that your metabolism is speeding up and rising:

1. You may get more hot and sweaty throughout the day and during the night (night sweats).

In contrast, you may have noticed your body temperature was always low and cold, and it was extremely difficult to get warm when you were losing weight, dieting, and overexercising.

2. Another sign is not peeing several times throughout the night and sleeping soundly without having to get up to go pee repeatedly.

3. Also, you’ll have more energy, stabilized mood, better digestion, your sex drive starts to increase, and so much more!!

There are many more symptoms, and if you'd like to get a more thorough list, click the banner below to get your free metabolic-mind connection test to see how many low metabolic markers you're experiencing:

I hope this article helps you along your healing journey! ❤️  

Xx 

Kayla Rose

Holistic Nutritionist

P.S. I’m hosting a free masterclass specifically for people who want to stop feeling obsessed around food and truly heal their metabolism, and you’re invited! Click here to sign up.

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