Nutrition: Are You Eating Enough?

Here's a question people frequently don't think about -- "Are you eating enough?"

When you're dieting down, obviously you cut your calories. However you'll reach a point when you can no longer reduce your calories anymore, you hit a plateau, you're not losing your weight, and you're stuck with what you do at that point.

That's when you may need to either do a little reverse dieting or look at taking a diet break. Once you reach the bottom of your calorie intake (typically not lower than your BMR or basal metabolic rate) your body will most likely adapt to that set point and not lose any more weight. That's when you need to gradually add calories back in, taking a a diet break to let your body re-adapt. Many times, you'll start increasing calories, and you won't gain weight. Doing this helps you start your calorie deficit or next round of dieting from a higher calorie point. To summarize, you cut calories, hit a plateau, take a short break and increase calories, let your body adapt, and then you start to cut again.

Often people don't eat enough, it sounds counter-intuitive, but you do need to eat at least enough that your body burns which is called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure or TDEE. Ideally, you need to eat just below that (like 10%-15% less than TDEE) to lose weight.

Many people think they need to eat only 1,000 calories or 1,200 calories. But if you just keep reducing, reducing, eventually you're going to hit a wall. And that can do damage to your metabolism. Your body is like, "Alright I'm starving, I'm gonna latch on to everything.

If you're unsure of whether or not you're eating enough, shoot me a DM or visit TDEEcalculator.net, plug in your numbers (age, weight, height, etc.) and you'll quickly see where your starting point should be.