Cynthia Sepulveda
The Beginning
Cynthia came from a background of trying dieting strategies for years to lose weight, which led to body image and disorder eating. She was eating very little for the amount of training and physical activity. Powerlifting training, dancing multiple days a week and working an intensive job, the body was chronically stressed and unable to make progress. She just wanted to get in shape and continue to do powerlifting. At the time, she was working with a coach in powerlifting.
The Goal
The goal was to get her in shape for a photoshoot through nutrition intervention.
The Strategy
Getting in shape (or getting toned) means reducing fat tissue that sits on top of your muscle. Changing shape needs to be done by strategically increasing food intake to increase performance in the gym so we can effectively build muscle in influence the metabolism positive to be more effective at losing fat. Given the suggested strategy, I proposed that we take care of Cynthia’s training to orient the training for better metabolic adaption before transitioning back to powerlifting.
The Method
We focused initially on increasing food intake to get more out of her training performance then systematically increased training capacity to improve metabolic adaption. Because she could train harder with more intensity, she lost fat and gained muscle simultaneously as this was a substantial new stimulus for her. We worked up to 3500 calories and got very strong. In the final phases, we were able to work the deficit to a much higher capacity, not dropping below 1700 calories.
The Result
She went from 18% to 13% for the photoshoot, also building 2kg of muscle throughout the process, and weighed 51kg. She also competed in powerlifting; her squat went from 95kg to 120kg and deadlift from 130 kg to 147.5kg.