Eating habits healthier - eating disorder and so much more
Maybe you’re not there yet, but are on your way to get unhealthy eating habits. It does not matter if you’re eating too much food, empty calories or starving yourself by not eating. Our bodies are meant to be fed, so l am not going to specify different unhealthy eating habits or disorders, but instead I’ll on focus on how important it is to eat enough and right. Also from training perspective.
Lot of girls and why not boys (heck even top athletes), go through or are close to developing an eating disorder. I want to emphasise that not eating enough and not letting yourself eat is the first thing to change. It is A-okey to eat normal amounts of food and start from there, if you need to change anything. Of course everything in moderation but it does not mean you have to go day in day out in hunger.
You might be in the fear that eating more will make you more fat, or you see a post ‘what I eat in a day’ from a skinny fitness girls and realise you eat more than that. I find this extremely heart breaking, as all of our bodies are different and we shouldn’t focus too much on what other people are doing. We are all in different chapters of our lives. Focus on yourself and understand that with healthy nutrition your body functions the best. Others might be in the stage of cutting down their body fat to very low and are in completely different category than the rest of us. So focus on yourself and don’t
feel bad for any healthy bite you eat. There's no much misconceptions, so be careful what you believe. In my case, I thought skipping breakfast and eating minimum calories whilst working out is the way to get fit. NO no and N-O. Know better, it's a process you're going to go through to get a healthy relationship with food. Slowly you will get there and learn! I learned that you can eat a whole lot of good foods when you exercise hard. Like a lot more. I went, from delusional thinking that you can build muscle and get fit with just 1000 calories a day, to eating +2000 calories a day and training hard and heavy. Added to that l cycle to school and work so l maintain high levels of physical activity in my everyday life, thus resulting in higher (way higher) number of calories burned (rather than sitting all day and driving everywhere). l am maintaining my weight a lot better now hehe.. by getting heavier in the last 6 months by 4kg in pretty much muscle only. Stop looking at the scale and start looking what you put on your plate.
In fact, ‘’studies show that a greater number of calories can result in more weight loss than a smaller number of calories, so long as one pays careful attention to the nutrient density of the food eaten’’. This is a straight quote from a book: The Core written by Oskari Saari (2015), following sport coach Aki Hintsa’s healthy lifestyle methods and years of research and experience.
What you can get out of that is to understand that eating correctly you can and will still loose weight or obtain it in healthy levels. In order to lose weight, it’s not the calories necessary that needs to be cut down, but to focus on getting a variety of different nutrients. Even fats and especially fats. For example that handful of nuts, containing healthy fats will only enhance your metabolism and health, thus results in greater weight loss if desired. Do not be afraid to eat anything healthy.
PS. l am not claiming to be an expert but Aki Hintsa mentioned above was an expert.
l am just a true story of a girl, just like you. Before and after.
Even if it's not about weight loss, but you just don't have that correct relationship with food, trust that what's out there, whatever extreme diet or advice, nothing can not be achieved without a good healthy balanced diet. You want to live in a way that you can sustain your workouts and diet, so let it be normal, nothing magical is required. Slowly grow the intensity or length of your workouts. Physical activity requires food and if you're eating moderately healthy or too little and are not seeing results; eat sister! Train hard and eat well ! To build muscle mass you need to train your muscles hard - l aim every set to be close to failure. There's not much difference if you're doing 1 rep or 12 reps, if you work it close to failure. If you're not a fan of heavy lifting, but you still need to lift heavy, you can alternatively substitute heavy 2 max rep to less heavier 12 rep close to failure. In both you need to work your muscle near failure in order for them to work, in matter of building muscle or hypertrophy.
To make a change, it takes time. But to start a change, it takes no time at all. Start now.