If you've ever tried to starve your way into a leaner, stronger body, you need to hear this story before you waste one more day doing it. Rob Polenik — the coach behind the C3 Method, a certified strength and nutrition expert with a Master's in Human Nutrition, an ACSM personal training certification, and a NASM Corrective Exercise Specialist credential — spent 2.5 years anorexic as a teenager, convinced that eating nothing and training like a lunatic would build the body he wanted. It didn't. In fact, undereating and fat loss turned out to be nearly opposite forces, and it took years of painful trial and error for him to understand why.
Rob has since coached over 3,000 clients — IFBB pros, national and world record-holding powerlifters, Olympic and CrossFit Games athletes, and everyday people rebuilding their relationship with food after clinical eating disorders. But before any of that, he was a 15-year-old kid doing 250 push-ups and 250 sit-ups a night, eating almost nothing, and getting angrier and more confused every time his body refused to change.
In this post, you'll learn exactly what went wrong in Rob's approach, why chronic undereating actually preserves stubborn body fat while eating away your muscle, and the specific protein, carb, and fat principles he now uses with clients — from clinically diagnosed anorexia patients referred by psychiatrists to pro-level competitors. This isn't theory. It's what happens when you live the mistake for three years and then spend two decades fixing it in other people.
Rob's anorexia didn't start with a diagnosis or a diet plan — it started with a comment from a friend during a play fight: "at least I'm not fat." Rob wasn't overweight. He describes himself at 15 as skinny fat — 5'6", 165 pounds, no visible definition, but not what anyone would call obese. Still, the comment lodged itself in his mind, and he internalized it as a personal failure.
That night, on his 15th birthday, he set a goal: 250 push-ups and 250 sit-ups every single night, paired with eating almost nothing. His logic, as a 15-year-old with zero nutrition education, was that exercising a body part would grow the muscle underneath while starving the body would burn the fat on top. It felt logical. It was completely wrong.
For an entire year — 15 to 16 — he missed his workout goal only 10 times (seven of those on an Appalachian Trail hiking trip). He ate almost nothing: no breakfast, a few bites at lunch, minimal dinner just to avoid raising alarms with his parents. The result after a full year of nightly training and near-total food restriction? No visible change. Still 165 pounds. Still no muscle definition. His body simply had no material to build with.
At 16, Rob decided the missing piece wasn't food — it was resistance training. His parents bought him a $600 weight set for his birthday, and he began training with an intensity that bordered on self-harm. He'd load a bar he could barely curl for 20 reps and force himself to keep going until his hands went numb and the bar involuntarily dropped from his grip. He'd punch a canvas heavy bag without gloves until his knuckles bled, treating the pain as proof he was "leaving his old self behind."
He trained almost every single day for over a year straight, missing exercise only twice — once from inflammation so severe he vomited while trying to tighten a bolt on his machine, and once from anxiety flare-ups triggered by nervous system overload. Both times, he substituted a walk instead of skipping movement entirely.
Despite this brutal consistency, nothing changed. He grew six inches in height during this stretch (15 to 17.5) but stayed locked at 165 pounds with no visible muscle. The lesson: no amount of training volume can substitute for the raw materials your body needs to actually build tissue. You cannot punish a body into changing shape if you're simultaneously starving it.
At 17.5, heading into college, Rob started watching bodybuilding interviews from Rx Muscle and the Iron Asylum and noticed something everyone kept repeating: protein. That's when the analogy clicked for him — if you want to build a brick house, you need bricks. Protein is the brick. All the training in the world (the workers) means nothing without material to build with.
He started adding protein — lunch, post-workout shakes, dinner with his family. But protein alone still didn't work. That's when he connected the second piece: carbohydrates are the fuel that lets the workers actually convert the bricks into a house. Without carbs, protein just sits there — your body doesn't have the energy to use it for muscle repair and growth.
This led him to a Lee Priest magazine article describing a bodybuilder's offseason diet: a whole chicken breast, a loaf of bread, and a gallon of milk. Rob adapted it into drinking a gallon of fat-free milk a day for two straight years — which, in hindsight, was too much and did add unwanted fat gain, but it marked the definitive end of his anorexia and the beginning of an entirely different relationship with food.
This is the part Rob now teaches every client who comes to him with a history of undereating, including patients referred directly by psychiatrists for clinically diagnosed anorexia. Here's what actually happens physiologically when you chronically eat below your BMR:
Your body does not respond to prolonged undereating by simply burning fat indefinitely. Instead, it shifts into a protective state — holding onto stored body fat while breaking down muscle tissue for energy because you're not supplying it with the protein needed to repair and maintain that muscle. The scale weight drops, but the composition gets worse, not better.
Rob describes the exact visual pattern he sees over and over in chronic undereaters: soft pockets of fat that never go away — inner thighs, lower back, under the glutes, the belly pooch below the belly button, under the armpits — even as the person gets lighter and lighter. That's muscle loss and bone density loss disguised as "progress" on the scale. Some of his clients have gotten dangerously gaunt before family intervention or hospitalization became necessary. This is not a hypothetical risk — it's a pattern he's watched repeat across his own body, clinical clients, and general population clients alike.
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Q: Why doesn't eating less help you lose more fat?
When you chronically eat below your BMR, your body shifts into a protective state that preserves stored fat while breaking down muscle for energy since it's not getting the protein it needs for repair. The scale drops, but you're losing muscle and bone density, not the stubborn fat you're actually trying to eliminate.
Q: How much protein do I actually need to build muscle?
Rob recommends between 0.6 and 1.2 grams of protein per pound of lean (not total) body weight, with most muscle-building clients landing around 1.0–1.2 g/lb. If you don't lift weights at all, the lower end applies — but for anyone training seriously, staying near the top of that range is essential.
Q: Do carbohydrates make you gain fat?
No — carbohydrates are an energy nutrient your body uses to fuel workouts and convert protein into muscle tissue. Fat gain happens when total energy intake (carbs plus fats combined) chronically exceeds what you burn, not from carbohydrates themselves.
Q: What are the physical signs of chronic undereating?
Look for stubborn soft pockets of fat around the inner thighs, lower back, under the glutes, the lower belly, and under the armpits that don't disappear even as your weight keeps dropping. This pattern signals muscle and bone loss rather than genuine fat loss progress.
Q: Can you recover a normal relationship with food after years of undereating?
Yes — Rob is proof of this, having gone from a 165-pound anorexic teenager to competing in strongman at 300 pounds and now leaning down toward a potential bodybuilding show. Recovery starts with reintroducing adequate protein, carbohydrates, and fats gradually while working with someone who can guide the process without judgment.
Q: How do I calculate my starting calorie target?
Use a BMR calculator (Rob suggests calculator.net) to find your baseline metabolic rate, then set your starting maintenance calories at roughly 70% of your total daily energy needs. From there, track your body's response over several weeks and adjust protein, carbs, and fats based on results.
Rob's 2.5 years of anorexia weren't caused by a lack of effort — he trained harder than almost anyone, missing workouts only a handful of times across years of daily punishment-driven training. What he lacked was the raw material: protein to build with, carbohydrates to fuel the process, and enough overall energy for his body to actually change. That single missing piece cost him three critical developmental years and untold physical and emotional pain — pain he now uses to help clients, including those with clinically diagnosed eating disorders, avoid the exact same trap.
If any part of this story feels familiar — the guilt, the chronic undereating, the frustration of training hard and seeing nothing change — know that the fix isn't willpower or more punishment. It's the right amount of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, applied consistently and adjusted based on how your body actually responds. That's the entire foundation of the C3 Method, and it's available to you without judgment.
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For the full, unfiltered story — including details on Rob's throat and sleep apnea struggles, the heavy bag punching sessions, and how a Lee Priest magazine article changed the trajectory of his life — listen to the complete episode: 2345 - What I Learned From Being Anorexic for 2.5 Years.