Eat More to Lose More!

Are you struggling to lose weight, but can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong? It might just be because you aren’t eating enough food!

Wait…what just happened?!

Here’s a scenario that I’m betting 90% of you can relate to: You start exercising and eating less, and you jump on the scale and see that you have lost weight! Yay! You get really excited about your progress, so you start exercising even more and eating less than before (so you can lose even more weight the following week, which brings you closer to your goal weight!). You jump on the scale the following week and you didn’t lose a single pound! Wait…what just happened?! You are now confused and depressed that all of your efforts for the past week have been wasted. Sound familiar? It happens to the best of us…

Starvation Mode? Not Good…

Here’s what’s going on in your body: When you eat too little, especially with the amount of exercise you are now doing, your body goes into “starvation mode”, where it holds on to everything, making it so that you can’t lose weight! You have to provide your body with the nutrients and the calories it needs to be able to function properly, and even lose extra fat.

Track it!

I suggest signing up for a calorie tracking program, such as Lose it!, since you can track what you eat and make sure you are eating enough. Lose it!, for example, adjusts the amount of calories you can eat every day based on your weight loss goals and how much you exercise. First you provide information about yourself, determine how much weight you want to lose each week, and it calculates how many calories you should eat each day and a goal date of when you should reach your goal weight. When you enter in exercise, it calculates how much more food you should be eating each day – and still lose the determined amount of weight you specified to lose each week. The more you exercise, the more you eat. Pretty cool, huh? Just make sure you don’t over do it with the exercise. Find a happy balance and stick with it.

(Please note: The writer does not get paid from promoting Lose it!, though it would be really nice if she did get paid! ;) She just uses the Lose it! app herself, and thought it was an awesome program to share with all of you! You can use any program, just make sure it adjusts your calories based on the amount of exercise you do each day.)

Measure, Measure, Measure!

Just like you don’t want to under eat, you don’t want to over do it either. For those who use a form of calorie counting to stay on track, measuring out your food is more important than many realize.  For example, I like to snack on celery and dip it into almond butter as a snack. I used to guess what I thought two tablespoons should be, and used that as my guide for a serving of almond butter. Finally, one day I decided to measure out two tablespoons of almond butter. I remember thinking “that’s it? That’s two tablespoons of almond butter? Oops…!” As you can tell, my two tablespoons was way more than the actual two tablespoons!

It was a funny moment for me, but an experience that taught be a valuable lesson. Measure everything, because a lot of times your imagination is a lot bigger than reality when you are hungry or trying to calorie count!

Of course, I think that eating healthy foods is the main thing to focus on, but high calorie health foods like almond butter should be measured out when you are trying to lose weight and need to stick to a certain calorie limit each day.

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