In a recent post, bodybuilder and YouTuber Tristyn Lee shared a video that unpacked his experience maintaining “four per cent body fat” for two years. Previously, the now-19-year-old went viral on Facebook and YouTube for his incredibly shredded physique, a look that was attained during his early teens and, inevitably, received a lot of backlash from viewers.
Four years later, Lee is sharing the tribulations that he experienced as a teen bodybuilder clutching onto an extremely low body fat percentage. “Let’s talk about how getting shredded ruined my life,” says Lee in the start of the video. “We’re going to take a deeper dive into the downfalls of the seemingly glorious lifestyle that you have seen over the past few years, with me maintaining sub-five per cent body fat.”
It all started three years ago, Lee explains, when he started becoming “a little more obsessed with the numbers. Back then, I was having 3000+ calories and I was playing soccer as well as doing bodybuilding,” he says. “My focus shifted…to only bodybuilding, to how I was looking [and] how lean I was. I started obsessing over every little detail about my food and my diet just to get to the sub-five per cent body fat level.” Lee goes onto explain that scrutinising his diet — and weighing every ingredient of every meal to the gram — led him to become “delusional”.
In turn, this went on to affect his appetite, where his body was no longer registering its biological hunger cues. “It was instead determined on what numbers I was seeing on MyFitnessPal,” he explains. “It started to become this vicious cycle of burn more, eat less and every single crutch I was using to feel less hungry began to increase.”
The next phase of Lee’s video focuses on his social life, and how it was affected by his tenacity for bodybuilding. It’s a familiar issue for those watching their food intake, but Lee’s experience takes it to the next level. “Seeing things on the menu and not knowing the nutrients became a massive thing for me,” he says. “I wouldn’t let myself go out and have a bite to eat with a friend or go out, because I didn’t know the calories in the food.” Not only was Lee obsessing over the numbers in his food, but also those in his step counting app. “If my phone didn’t say I hit 15,000 to 20,000 steps per day, I’d be beating myself up. It was this endless cycle of running my body into the ground and not giving it an opportunity to grow…I was killing myself by being so active.”
So far, so shocking. After this, Lee goes on to explain how these extreme measures — two to three workouts a day, eating under 1800 calories and walking over 20,000 steps — affected his life outside of training. “Sleep was probably one of the first things that took its toll on me,” he says. “As I dropped my calories from 3000 to 1800, my sleep continued to take a toll and I was only sleeping four to five hours a night.” His strength levels, dropped, and so did his mental health. “I didn’t want to spend time with people and I didn’t want to work on anything with people. I was so hyper-focused on doing these things to maintain a sub-five per cent body fat, which was not optimal.”
These days, Lee is eating 2800 calories a day again and has re-balanced his lifestyle with his training. “Now I’ve increased my calories and decreased my activity, my sleep has seen significant improvements.”
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io
Comments are closed.