01/05/2020 12:07
Could an inadequate calorie intake be the root cause of your health problems? Find out how to recognise the signs of under-eating.
Undereating is maybe the wrong term here.
Under-fuelling is probably more accurate.
As we spoke about previously - a low caloric intake changes metabolism and hormones. We need to be aware of specific signs and symptoms and trust us when we say "fuel for function".
Below are the top 7 signs and symptoms I see in my clients who are chronically under-eating.
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Your Weight Isn’t Budging
This is one of the hardest things to get your head around. It often goes hand-in-hand with overtraining. A number of clients I see come to me on extremely low calorie diets (around 1000-1200 calories per day) combined with 6-7 days per week of intense exercise like Crossfit or long distance running.
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. They also complain that there is a lack of muscle tone and feel "soft".
Many of these clients are also eating a very low carbohydrate diet with the goal of losing weight quickly.
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.
While a slight caloric deficit can lead to sustainable weight loss (think 300-500 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 includes reducing active thyroid hormone, shutting down sex hormone production, and raising stress hormones like cortisol. Chronically elevated cortisol leads to both leptin and insulin resistance, a disastrous hormonal state that can keep bodyweight high.
These hormonal changes can lead to stalled weight loss and body fat retention, along with many other negative health effects that go beyond weight loss resistance. So if you’ve been eating much less and exercising much more in a futile attempt to lose weight, consider whether this strategy has been working for you.
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Your Mood Is Totally Unpredictable
You've heard the term “hangry” before right?!
This urban slang refers to the state of anger and irritability resulting from being hungry. And even though it’s a made-up term, there’s actually scientific evidence for the existence of this volatile emotional state caused by inadequate food intake.
Not eating enough food can lead to hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Since the brain requires blood sugar to function optimally, when it starts to drop, one of the first cognitive processes that suffers is self-control. And your ability to exert self-control allows you to control your attention, regulate your emotions, cope with stress, resist impulsivity, and refrain from aggressive behaviour.
So if you’re always on a short fuse, or your mood is constantly swinging between cheerful and irritable or anxious, you should make sure that you’re not severely under-eating before making any other significant changes to your diet and supplement or medication routine.
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You Can’t Fall Asleep (Or Stay Asleep)
Oddly enough, one of the first symptoms that changes when I get my clients eating a more calorically appropriate diet is a significant improvement in sleep duration and quality. Even if they weren’t necessarily waking up hungry, many of my clients find that an increased calorie intake (especially from carbohydrates) can lead them to fall asleep faster and stop waking up at night.
One reason for this likely comes from the improved blood sugar control that arises from an appropriate calorie and carbohydrate intake. As your blood sugar drops overnight, your liver must release its stored glucose (in the form of glycogen) to keep your blood sugar steady.
If you’re constantly under-eating, and especially if you’re overexercising on top of that, your liver won’t have the glycogen stores it needs to keep your blood sugar stable, and your body must release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to promote gluconeogenesis, the process of creating new glucose. If these stress hormones elevate high enough, they can actually wake you up in the middle of the night.
Making sure you’re eating enough overall and including a balanced bedtime snack 1-2 hours before going to sleep can help keep your blood sugar stable overnight, leading to more restful, uninterrupted sleep.
Here is some advice on eating better to sleep better
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You’re Chronically Constipated
There are a few reasons why chronic under-eating can cause constipation. The most obvious is that faeces is made up of waste matter from the digestion of food, so if you’re not getting enough food, your stool won’t have much bulk to it.
The less obvious, but more likely reason that under-eating can lead to constipation is due to the effects of undernutrition on thyroid hormone. Under-eating can cause a down-regulation of T3, the active thyroid hormone. This can lead to a condition called euthyroid sick syndrome, where T3 is low, reverse T3 is high, and TSH and T4 are often normal. This means your body develops hypothyroidism symptoms without necessarily showing any change in the typical thyroid function markers that most doctors check.
Constipation is a very common symptom of hypothyroidism, as active thyroid hormone helps stimulate peristalsis in the gut, keeping digestion humming along smoothly. When T3 drops, gut motility slows, and this can lead to chronic constipation. So if you’re only having a bowel movement every couple of days, check your caloric intake and make sure you’re not under-eating.
We have our gut health program available - check it out here
You’re Always Cold
Caloric restriction is known to cause a drop in body temperature. A lowered body temperature can be due to a decrease in thermogenesis, since your body needs a certain amount of ingested calories to create heat, as well as due to the hormonal changes that come from caloric restriction, such as thyroid hormone reduction and HPA axis disruption. Low insulin can also lead to low body temperature, so some people on a very low carbohydrate diet will experience this symptom as well.
I may be sounding like a broken record at this point, but if you’re always cold, even in the summertime, it’s highly likely that you’re not getting enough to eat.
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You have a distinct lack of motivation to exercise
Eat more you will want to move more. If your calories are too low your body will adjust your output to compensate.
Getting up at 5am to train can be a grind sure, but if you are constantly just grinding through sessions then you may need to look at increasing your intake so that you are thriving in sessions, not just surviving them.
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You Can’t Get Pregnant
Scientists have known for a long time that low-calorie dieting and inadequate body fat can lead to infertility and amenorrhea in women. One of the most commonly seen manifestations of this problem is known as hypothalamic amenorrhea, which is hallmarked by menstrual irregularity or amenorrhea and low energy availability, with or without an eating disorder. Menstrual irregularity doesn’t necessarily mean a missed period, it can simply mean a woman is having an anovulatory cycle, meaning there is no egg released during the ovulatory period.
Hypothalamic amenorrhea caused by chronic caloric deprivation is also associated with physiological changes like hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis overactivity (also known as adrenal fatigue) and disturbances in the hypothalamic-pituitary-thyroid axis (also known as euthyroid sick syndrome).
I’ve worked with many clients who recovered their period after returning to a normal caloric intake. So if you’ve been struggling to get pregnant and you have a history of dieting and exercising for weight loss, it’s possible that your low-calorie diet is preventing you from getting pregnant.