Q: I’m a professional male model and someone showed me a diet about 5 years ago that is a bodybuilding type of diet. It really helped me keep my weight down and steady and it’s been a great part of my career. But unfortunately, it’s not as effective anymore and I’m more prone to cheats now. I don’t know why that is, and it isn’t important except for knowing why in order to fix it. Should I take ephedrine now that the diet isn’t working as well?

A: Since you didn’t tell us much about what kind of diet it was, we’ll assume you mean the standard, “high protein-moderate to low carb-moderate fat” diet. There are many reasons why a way of eating or exercising ceases to be effective. Knowing more information is probably best in order to conclude that ephedrine is the best path. It could be that you are stagnating just because you eat the same foods day in and day out, or that you are keeping your calories too consistently low. Often in examining these things, it isn’t cause for panic, simply some sort of stagnation or some sort of consistency that is not working with the body. It’s great to be consistent, on one hand, but it’s not great to be so consistent that your body becomes accustomed to it. You may want to cycle your carbs for awhile… and increase your cardio on higher carb days. Or, change up your cardio that you do, or add interval training to your regime. Try lifting in a circuit fashion (better for a model body anyhow) or changing something up, one thing at a time, to see what kickstarts your body. Also, as you get older, you need to step things up because your metabolic rate slows gradually. Remember, nothing changes until something changes. That, you can count on! If do you want to try a product, try a Xenadrine RFA-1 over the counter, or another product that contains ephedrine. Or, you can do an ECA stack. That would be Ephedrine 25mg/ Caffeine 100-200mg/ Aspirin 325mg per day for two weeks on and two weeks off.