So you want to run a marathon. Or you want to lose the baby weight. Maybe you want to get stronger and starting to lift weights but not seeing results.
You’re getting up early to train. You workout fasted because your stomach cannot handle food before you workout. You grab a coffee or a protein bar afterwards before you shower, get the kids to school, get to work, get on with your day. You then grab a salad for lunch, if you get lunch at all. You’re ravenously hungry, but also dead tired at 3 pm so you snack on whatever you can find, junk in the office, your kids’ leftovers, or you run through the Starbucks drive through for a giant coffee. You make dinner and want more food, but feel eating seconds or larger portions means you’re eating too much. You crash into bed late and either can’t fall asleep or wake up at 3 am every morning and cannot go back to sleep. Rinse, repeat, every day.
Can you see what is wrong with this picture?
YOU NEED TO EAT MORE.
How to Determine If You Need to Eat More
Even if you THINK you’re eating enough to fuel your goals, chances are you aren’t. Years of diet culture tell you that you should only eat so much. And your body is probably USED to eating too little, so adding in more food is overwhelming. You feel full just thinking about how you could possibly eat more.
But then you get up and do your training run and can’t make the goal paces. Or you get a stress fracture. Or the baby weight doesn’t budge. Maybe the scale keeps going UP.
If your body doesn’t get enough food to fuel your activity, it’s going to go into survival mode. It is going to store up what it can, not knowing when it is going to get fuel again. Not eating enough is a stressor on the body. Stress releases cortisol, which puts the body on alert for danger, so any non essential functions get down graded. Your body halts thyroid hormone production. Your metabolism slows down to conserve energy. Your periods may stop because your body can’t handle growing a baby with too little energy, so the reproductive system shuts down.
Most of us need to eat significantly more than we think we do. Many clients come to me with a lot of seemingly unrelated symptoms, and when we dig deep into what is going on, it comes down to either a specific nutrient deficiency or inadequate overall intake. Either option means they need to eat MORE.
Eating more may seem scary. And I’m not saying jump your overall intake up by hundreds of calories at once. That will also stress out your body. We need to gradually start eating more. And if we have spent years not eating enough, we may not be able to just listen to our bodies to tell us when it’s hungry or full. We may need to eat routinely whether we feel hungry or not. We need to train our bodies to expect fuel at regular intervals.
Where to Start When You Need to Eat More
The best way to do this?
Start with breakfast.
If you don’t feel hungry in the morning when you wake up, this is a clear sign that you are not eating enough. After fasting all night long while you were sleeping, your body should want food in the morning. You need to fuel your morning workout. You need to set your body up for success for the day. And to do that, it needs energy. Energy is calories.
Start small. Eat SOMETHING in the morning within an hour of waking up. And once that feels good, work up to 30 grams of protein plus a carb. Then move on to lunch, snack, dinner. Calculate your total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) to see how much you should be eating overall in a day to fuel your activity and gradually increase your calories to hit that goal over the course of a few months. See how you feel. I guarantee if you’re eating enough, you’ll be hitting your activity goals and feeling good. (And if you aren’t, there is something else going on, so shoot me an email and let’s chat further!)
