WHY SHOULD I EAT IF I’M NOT HUNGRY? PART I

Skipping meals (or not eating enough at meals) can trigger your body’s biochemistry into creating hunger later in the day or evening, so that you will increase your food intake to meet its energy needs. It can also slow down your metabolism in order to conserve energy. It’s what your body does when it is placed into starvation mode.

That is exactly the opposite of what every person wants to accomplish, whether they are dieting or not. This is why engaging in low calorie or extreme dieting can ultimately end up making you fat. It not only impacts a person biochemically and physiologically, but it also impacts us psychologically.

Eating low-calorie negatively affects your health, your mental capabilities, your mood and your energy intake – which can trigger fatigue, anxiety, depression, a preoccupation with eating and place your body into starvation mode.

Starvation mode is a term given to the effects that chronic dieting and over-exercising have on your metabolism, hunger levels and body weight. Your body is created with a complex biological system in place to help ensure that you get enough energy (or food) and rest when you’re running low. Unfortunately, many of us override these important messages our bodies send us in order to attempt to lose weight fast.

You can definitely experience some temporary weight loss when putting your body into starvation mode; however, the sabotaging of your metabolism eventually becomes one of the main reasons you will gain weight back and end up struggling to lose weight again later. There is a lot of research showing how sudden weight loss from cutting calories too low can reduce your metabolism due to the body trying to preserve energy from a lack of food.

Starvation won’t occur when you cut calories for a short period, like when you are sick; it will be the end result when you have lowered your energy intake for prolonged periods of time, like weeks or months. We see this often when a person comes in for their initial consult as we view their BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) on their body composition.

Next, we will look at how nutrients get converted into one universal energy unit called ATP, which keeps the body functioning normally.