I want to thank you for this article, in particular. I find it utterly fascinating to learn how fat affects how our bodies function–and that those of us who were/are “fatties” face an entirely different situation physiologically when it comes to having “great bods.”

I deeply appreciate your review of the research and for making this information available. Thank you.

You write, per your 2nd recommendation: “After finishing your diet, regardless of how lean you get, take 2 weeks to eat at roughly maintenance calorie levels before starting your mass gaining phase. The reason has to do with the physiological adaptations to dieting described briefly above. **Although you can’t reverse all of them short of getting fat again (or fixing the problem pharmaceutically), 2 weeks at maintenance,** which by definition should be higher calories than you were eating on your diet, will help to normalize some of them. Leptin, thyroid, SNS output should improve a bit, along with other hormones, putting you in a better place to gain mass without super excessive fat gain…”

Are you saying that no amount of caloric maintenance time after, say, dieting down to 8% without “getting fat again” will normalize physiological adaptations to simulate, even if imperfectly, the way genetically lean people naturally and disproportionately put on LBM? And that at best we should expect most adaptations to occur after 2 weeks at maintenance?

This question stems from the distinction you draw between genetically lean people and dieted down lean people. Most of the reasons you give for refuting the idea that dieted down lean people can achieve the same “bulking” results as genetically lean people seem more to do with the diet aspect (provisional hormonal and neurochemical changes) and not with being non-genetically gifted. In other words, to try to make my dumbass make sense here I’ll use a hypothetical, if I reach 8 or 9% bf and stay there for several months (or what have you), eating at maintenance, will my body emerge from whatever hormonal environment it existed in during the diet and begin to take on characteristics (whatever that means) of a genetically lean individual, even though obviously I wouldn’t be a genetically lean person, thus allowing me to then bulk up without worrying about fat gain as much as if I were bulking immediately (or even 2 weeks) after a diet? Can I have my cake and eat it too?

Lyle