If you don’t eat enough, you could be hindering weight loss…
Your Weight Isn’t Budging- This is one of the most paradoxical symptoms of someone who is undereating and it often goes hand in hand with overtraining. Most clients that I work with are active (workout 4-5 days per week at least 1 hour per training session). These individuals are also active in their daily lives, and tend to eat pretty clean. It’s not until we take a 5 day food log they we determine they are on an extremely low-calorie diets (around 1,000 to 1,200 calories per day). The combination of high intensity exercise and extremely low calories leaves clients perplexed.
For good reason, they are extremely frustrated that their weight isn’t changing; for some of these clients, their weight has actually been increasing since they dropped their food intake and started working out more. Many of these clients are also eating a very low carb diet with the goal of losing weight quicklys (we’ll talk carbs later this week).
We’ve been trained to believe that the body is a machine, and we can input and output our calories in a way that will cause weight loss. So it’s understandable why these clients would expect to see weight loss from a significant caloric deficit like that. But the fact is, they simply can’t lose the last 15 to 30 pounds no matter how little they eat. Why is this?
While a short-term, moderate caloric deficit can lead to sustainable weight loss (think 300 to 500 calories per day), much larger deficits induce changes in your body’s metabolism in order to keep your body in a homeostatic balance. Your body does not like major, drastic changes, and it will make modifications to your thyroid, adrenal, and sex hormones in order to reduce your overall caloric output.
This leads to a whole host of other problems including sleeplessness, lack of sex drive, injury, and so much more.
If your weight loss plan just isn’t working, you are chronically fatigued, always injured, or need to take a serious look at your diet, I am here to help. Click the link below to schedule a free assessment today and let’s work together to bring out the best version of you!