So I'm going to try and explain to you without getting too scientific, why it's important to consume the correct number of calories. Basically one of the biggest mistakes I see people make with their nutrition. Is actually not eating enough. I'm extremely guilty of this too.
I'm going to use this past week as an example. I have been super stressed this week dealing with the loss of a friend and feeling helpless in a situation with animals. This caused me to hammer myself work wise. Working on average 10 hours a day over the public holiday in a physically demanding job where I think I averaged about 35,000 steps a day. During this time I didn't make use of my breaks and was litterally running off adrenalin and caffeine for 3 days. When I got my morning off on Tuesday I crashed hard I could barely drag myself to do my reception shift at the gym. That was the beginning, do to stress I let it slip, eating had been the last thing on my mind. I think I was lucky to consume 450 calories a day for most of the week. And I have felt awful. I've had no energy been fighting waves of nausea and just downright feeling shit.
Now what also happens in this time is I have no energy to actually meal prep or make just one meal. So those 450 calories I did get are from poor quality foods like take away chips, potato cakes and hash browns. This all sets off a chain reaction.
When you don't eat enough your body kicks into survival mode. Now in this time your body will store nearly everything but mostly fat. So tomorrow it has something to fuel it through the calorie deficit. What we don't realise is most of us need around 1800 calories a day minimum even if we are trying to lose weight. To stop your body eating muscle you need to replenish it when you exercise, but not only that your body burns calories just keeping you alive so it's doubly important that for those wanting to gain muscle or maintain that they are NOT in a calorie deficit. Depending on how bad your deficit is, you will see more and more changes, very quickly. 2000 quality calories is a good average, (I'll give you a formula to calculate how much you should be eating in another blog in a few hours). Minus 200 calories we get 1800 now thats a good deficit to see weightloss and still maintain energy levels. However once you get lower than 1600 you start seeing drastic changes.
Here's me in a week of struggling to get in 500 calories a day. And let me tell you self image wise I feel disgusting and uncomfortable. But I know that with just two weeks of making sure I take care of my body, nearly all of this will be gone. That's the luxury I have now that I'm fit. When I was overweight it took a lot longer to realise why I was bloating, why my skin was bad, why I was still putting on weight even though I barely ate anything. SURVIVAL MODE STORAGE mixed with NO EXERCISE lead to me to be my heaviest. I still struggle with these things as I said when I'm stressed I fall into bad habits, it's no excuse but I'm holding myself accountable and showing you all how damaging my behaviour this week actually was to my body and mind.
The photos here show the changes to my body due to this past week. I have been doing some exercise but haven't had the energy to actually train. The left is me just over a week ago, and the right I took today. I also added a photo of my face, my camera auto touches and even still you can see how drastically my complexion has suffered as a result of me neglecting myself. But since starting this blog a few days ago I've been getting back on track. It's not something you can just jump straight back into your body needs to readjust again but I'm already feeling better inside.
Hopefully by sharing this with you it might help you identify your own destructive habits you may relate on a different level. The biggest reasons I hear is "I don't have time" or "I'm not hungry at the moment I'll wait til next break". Don't neglect your body. In my next post I'll give you the tools to work out how many calories you need. It's about consuming quality calories from there. Now it's not as hard to find quality calories as we think. We all know what healthy food is, there's no need to actually diet. We just need to make the effort to create good habits rather than destructive ones.
