Average Joe Story Part 4: Unexpected Weight Loss Problems.

As with all things in life there will always be unexpected problems that will arise in all the best laid plans.  My Fitness Journey also had a large unexpected problem and that was the quite hotly debated Starvation Mode!!!!

I was still going strong on my conviction to lose the forty pounds that would get me under the magical two hundred pound mark.  I had completed two cycles of Insanity by https://www.beachbody.com/.  I continued to count my calories on the http://www.myfitnesspal.com/ app on my smart phone (you don't need the phone you can use it online).  Everything was going perfectly and the weight was flying off even fasted the originally planned.  I was thinking that the under two hundred pound mark was going to be checked off the list before the end of summer. 

When people get a little cocky and over confident is usually when the rug gets pulled right out from under them.  It did for me on this journey. 

I was doing the second and harder month of Insanity a third time when I started to notice that the workouts weren't getting any easier anymore, but were getting harder for some reason.  I chalked it up to the fact I hadn't worked out for this long since high school and vowed to power through it.  I didn't think anything was particularly wrong just needed to work through it, boy was I wrong.

One afternoon after struggling through another Insanity workout in the morning I was standing watching my daughter play on the floor of my living room.  The suddenly my vision went completely black and I reached out to grab the wall that I happened to be standing next to. 

Now working it didn't take working in the medical field for over ten years to know that just randomly blacking out while standing still was not normal.  So I immediately went to my two favorite sources of guidance for anything my older brother and sister. 

My big brother is a natural body builder that couches for a company called http://3dmusclejourney.com/ and my sister is a runner that has run more marathons and half marathons then I can keep track of.  They both said the same thing and that I was in ketoacidosis or starvation mode.

The first thing I said was "Impossible!"  I was at two hundred and twenty pounds and not currently hungry there was no way I was in ketoacidosis.  Ketoacidosis is what most people with anorexia go through and I by no means had anorexia.  So on both of their recommendations I emailed my doctor and asked for a urine test to test for ketones in my urine.  Sure enough my body was breaking down my muscle in order to feed itself.  I had been in to high of a caloric deficit for two long and my body and gone anorexic.

Anorexia is a mental disorder.  Anorexic is the action your body goes into when it is starving.  So I had to start eating again and it had made me wonder if that is why I failed so many times in the past to lose the weight.  Maybe I was dieting correctly, but not intelligently.