You’re not eating enough.

This is easily my biggest takeaway from the last few years of nutrition coaching.

You’re overweight so everyone’s first thought is you must be eating too much junk food on a daily basis, but this is almost never the case.

80% of the people, ESPECIALLY women, who come to me for weight loss are chronically under eating.

 Confused? You are not alone.

Most active women SHOULD be sustaining their body weight on just over 2k calories, minimum. After years of trying every diet under the sun their metabolism is for lack of a better term, burnt out. You are no longer in a good space to lose weight and you may even feel like you gain weight VERY easily.

So, what’s going on? Metabolic adaptation.

Your body is an adaptation machine. Whether it’s nutrition or exercise your body will work hard to become efficient at whatever you give it. It’s only pritoty is keeping you alive.

Efficient sounds like a positive word but when it comes to your body this is not what you want. Efficient means your body has learned to work off of little fuel and stores the rest. You are barely feeding it after all it may need those stores. What you really want is an inefficient metabolism that will burn through whatever you give it.

If you heavily restrict calories to lose weight, maybe it works, but now your body has adapted to those very low calories as its new maintenance. Your body will down regulate its processes to live off of what you give it in the long term. This puts your metabolism in an overall bad place, especially in our current society where food is at every corner and often the focus of every social situation.

Maybe during the week, you have no issue sticking to your low-calorie approach on a regular basis, even though your energy is terrible. What happens over the weekend? Date night comes around and maybe you have more like 2200 calories for the day. No big deal, right? It wouldn’t be if your body was not adapted to more like 1400 calories, now 2200 is a surplus. This is why you feel like you gain weight so easily.

In order to create fat loss, we need to create a calorie deficit. But if you have been maintaining your current weight at 1000-1500 calories a day HOW do we pull even further? If we do maybe you do lose a few pounds before you eventually adapt, and no doubt you will feel terrible at these poverty calories, NOT sustainable. Now your metabolism is in an even worse position for long term weight loss that is sustainable.

This is where the prep work for the diet phase comes in. Take the time to find a better higher maintenance, but more importantly give your body the time it needs to feel safe and perform at optimal levels. It will make your next weight loss efforts that much easier and more successful.

This is the hardest thing for most people to understand and execute, questions? Send me a message and let’s talk!