What I find when looking at my clients' food diaries is that their total calories are too low and they are rarely hitting their macronutrient targets. When the weight still doesn’t come off they restrict their eating even more so the calories keep getting lower and lower.
Restricting calories and food/drink intake does work for weight loss, but it is not sustainable and will never work long term.
When do you stop cutting the calories? How low is too low? What happens when you’ve cut so low that you have nothing else to cut out? You do more training? What happens when you run out of hours in the day?
I know what happens – you down regulate your thyroid and pack on some more weight and as an added bonus you set yourself up for a bunch of bad health issues for the future.
I see it time and time again, girls that come in losing their hair, falling asleep throughout the day, low sex drive, depression, skin conditions, low training drive, ect.
How can we fix this?
Focus on eating good quality foods all throughout the day (more on this later).
Start by tracking the food and drink you consume throughout the day for 3-4 days – you can use an app like MyFitness Pal to keep it quick and easy.
Once you have gotten an average you will know if you are eating too little or too much and can address it accordingly:
- Focus on increasing the amount of good fats in the diet – avocadoes, coconut oil, nuts, organic butter, nut butter, etc. These are calorie dense and full of nutrients.
- Eat a serve of animal protein 3-5 times per day with green, leafy veggies.
- Avoid large amounts of processed foods and poor forms of calorie dense foods.
- Eat the majority of your carbohydrates around training.
- Stagger food throughout the day rather than a few good meals at the beginning of the day and then binging on food in the arvo/at night.
- Get adequate sleep – this is way more important than most people think.
If you still aren’t sure of what to do or what ‘diet’ to follow then just ask someone that knows what they are talking about (sometimes Google can just be confusing!!), and that doesn’t mean asking the fitness chick in the gym or the dietician that tells you you’re doing a good job because you only ate 9 cupcakes today instead of 10.
Do your research and know who you are taking advice from!
#teamthp
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