Watch My Weight Loss

My experience with the Velocity Diet

About a year ago, I wanted to see if I could quickly drop 20 pounds. I had been slacking for a few months and wanted to kick start my weight loss again. I decided to try the Velocity Diet.

In a nutshell, the Velocity diet consists of drinking protein shakes and taking various other supplements. You don’t really eat any solid food except once per week, you can have oatmeal. Every night you can have a small amount of natural peanut butter. Some of the supplements I took included CLA, Omega 3-6-9, and other healthy fats. I also added ground flaxseed to some of my shakes. It was a while ago so I don’t remember the exact details of it, but if you’re interested you can just Google Velocity Diet and you’ll find information about it.

There were 2 different caloric intakes on this program: a higher one for weight training days, and a lower one for non weight training days. All of the calculations to determine how many calories you should be taking in were provided on the website where I found the diet. The creator of the diet did not recommend doing cardio as it can cause muscle loss when you are restricting calories. He recommended doing 1 hour walks on non weight training days.

Again, a disclaimer. I’m going strictly by memory here. To get the exact details of the diet, you’d want to search for it. I do know that I followed his plan exactly, with the exception of the brand of protein he recommended. I used the brands of casein and whey which I already use and like.

Before I continue, I just want to say that this is definitely not something you would want to do long term. In fact, I personally will never do anything like this again. If I remember correctly, you are supposed to do it for 28 days. I only lasted 21 days. I am also not posting to discourage anyone from trying it, I’m merely describing my experience.

I guess if there is any benefit to doing something like this, it is that it’s extremely simple to plan your daily calories. It takes all of the guesswork out of that.

Now, for my experience.

The first few days were fine, I didn’t really notice too much in the way of hunger, even though my caloric intake was a lot lower than what I was used to. After a few days, though, I was really looking forward to that tablespoon of natural peanut butter every night. I was getting really sick of nothing but shakes. I started having trouble sleeping. Toward the end it was getting really bad. I couldn’t fall asleep easily, and when I did, my sleeps were restless and I was constantly waking up. I have no idea what was causing that.

I lost a bunch of weight the first week – 11 pounds! I now know that it was probably mostly water weight (because of a lack of carbs). The second and third weeks were not nearly so spectacular. Maybe a couple of pounds each.

Even though I tried to slowly re-introduce carbs to my diet, I gained a lot of that weight back right away, as soon as I started eating solid food again (probably the water weight I lost in the beginning). I continued exercising and eating a healthy diet, but I just couldn’t lose any more weight. It took over a month of this before I started seeing results again.

Now, I don’t claim to have all the answers, but here’s what I believe happened. I think that restricting calories so much caused my metabolism to slow way, way down. It took a month of eating normal amounts of food and exercising to get it back up to normal.

This was a lesson to me that there are no quick fixes when it comes to weight loss. The only healthy way to lose weight long term is through healthy eating and regular exercise. When you restrict calories too much, your body will fight back and not only will you be constantly hungry and more likely to binge, but you will stop seeing results. You do need a caloric deficit to lose weight, but not such a large deficit that it causes your metabolism to slow down. I also recommend having a higher calorie day every few days to help keep your metabolism humming.

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Tags: Calories, Diet, Eating