HRV and weight/ fat loss

🔴HRV heart rate variability is a great predictor of your Central nervous system.
📈In general terms higher than baseline HRV means your body is currently not experiencing stress. More inclined to be parasympathetic. (Primed for action.)
📉Lower than baseline means your body is experiencing some stress. More inclined to be sympathetic.

🔴Everyone’s baseline HRV is different, there are loads of trackers that track this now from Whoop, Oura, Apple Watch, Garmin, they’re also apps like elite HRV, and HRV4training which you can stick your finger on the phones camera to record your HRV.

🔴Our bodies can buffer acute stress really well, and can be really beneficial, introduce a Stress and you will get a slight drop in HRV and then a boost, do this enough times and you can eventually have a higher HRV baseline.
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Things Like exercising, cold showers, sauna, fasting.. you know the stuff all the cool kids are doing. Your HRV is an indicator of how you’ve handled the Hormetic stress.

🔴 Something our bodies doesn’t like is chronic stress.
This is a stress applied Day after Day. This can cause a drop in HRV day after day. If you don’t plan in a few recovery days this will ‘crash’ your central nervous system.
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One of these chronic stresses is dieting. The bigger your caloric deficit the bigger the potential stress. Other things do come into play. If you have a large caloric deficit but high vitamin and mineral and protein count. I would expect to see less stress than someone that has the same caloric deficit but with low value foods. Over the long term.

🤓Counterintuitively sometimes low value foods can actually raise your HRV. Because they’re so highly processed your body can extract the carbs protein and fat extremely easily without the need of your digestive system being stressed.

🔴If you have a device that monitors HRV don’t take my word for it try it for yourself. 😋Intuitively people have been doing cheat days since the early days of bodybuilding. There is a hormonal interplay here. The HRV just gives you a little window into what the body is doing.

🔴If you do a run you create stress,
🔴If you do a run and fast you create more stress
🔴If you do a run and fast and lift weights you create more stress

📉If you do all these things while chronically dieting you MAY not be able to recover adequately from the stress.
😎You may be a beast and handle this just fine.

📉Week 1-3 of your diet may not cause any HRV drops, but the more fat you lose the more you create stress, which will show in your HRV. This is why exercising like a manic and eating like snail rarely works.

🔴Once you start to ‘crash’ your central nervous system. It will create strong hormonal signals for you to resting more & eating more. If acted upon weight loss will soon become weight gain until central nervous system recovers. And the hormonal drivers begin to shut down.

The HRV is just a window into your physiology.

🔴My advice is learn to notice patterns in your HRV. Are you recovering after your workouts? Does it now take three days to recover after a workout rather than just two. What supplements help? what foods help? what foods hinder? Is your HRV baseline slowly or quickly dropping.

🔴HRV is a balance between stress and rest.

🔴You do not need to have a mad cheat day like the Rock. A few days at eating at maintenance. Can do the trick to get you back on course. Meditation, breath work and Avoiding other stressors. Can also help.

Let me know what you think is HRV something you check?

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