Overtraining or undereating?
Encouraging women to eat more is a daily conversation in my practice. Most of us grew up with the ‘eat less’ diet culture. It’s unfortunately one of the more damaging and self-defeating things you can do to yourself. Especially as an active individual.
Active women are at a higher risk for nutrient deficiencies and RED-s (relative energy deficiency in sport). Under fueling can significantly impact you in the short & long-term as immediate changes in your metabolism and hormone levels in response to being undernourished can become irreversible.
Not eating enough and overtraining, or the precursor to that – overreaching, can look very similar in its presentation. You might experience:
Fatigue.
Irritability and mood swings.
Low motivation, especially around training.
Poor performance – it’s hard to get your heart rate up, you feel heavy, can’t reach your normal speeds or intensity.
Slow or inadequate recovery.
Hormonal disruptions- irregular periods, worsening menopausal symptoms, missed periods.
Stress fractures, recurring injuries or slow to heal from injuries.
Weakened immune system – you start catching every bug going around and it takes you a long time to get over each one.
Digestive upset, low appetite, nausea, or a shift in bowel routines.
Hair loss
Weight gain - usually an increase in fat and a loss of or difficulty building muscle.
Ultimately, you feel lousy, moody and despite your increasing efforts your performance is dropping and your body might be changing in the opposite direction expected. What makes this more confusing is that these symptoms can come on with both undereating or overtraining. A common response is to train harder and more often OR eat even less as many women feel their body is rebelling. Both of those reactions will further the problem and make it even harder to recover from.
The reason these symptoms arise is because your body turns down it’s metabolic activity in response to not having enough energy (food) to function. It goes into conservation mode in attempts to keep you alive through the perceived famine. One big problem with this, in addition to how crummy you might feel, is that if you undereat for too long, 4 days is too long for many individuals, the metabolic and hormonal shifts may not be reversable.
In addition to your metabolism slowing down your thyroid gland will decrease its hormonal output triggering clinical or sub-clinical hypothyroidism, fatigue sets in and ovulation can even be suppressed.
These changes are significant! They have a notable impact on your immediate an lifelong health and vitality.
Overtraining is when the body is pushed passed its ability to recover. Overreaching occurs first and can happen with a bump up in training intensity or duration. If you continue to overreach further physiological breakdown happens and you move into overtraining. The latter can take much longer to recover from. Undereating plays into this as fueling appropriately before, during and after sessions or races is key for adequate recovery.
Under fueling is easy to do unintentionally. Temporary appetite suppression after hard exercise is a common physiological response making it difficult to eat after training. Working out in a fasted state and increasing the intensity or frequency of training without adjusting your nutrition can be a bad setup and yet so easy to accidentally do.
The whole dialogue of how much you “should” eat is tricky and an independent topic in and of itself. One that can be triggering. A caloric intake of approximately 1400 calories/day is considered the average minimum to sustain normal physiological function. That’s with no exercise, just breathing, digesting and chilling. The more fit you are, the higher your resting metabolic rate is, meaning you need more calories for baseline functioning. Now think about how many calories you burn with exercise? Yeah, it can be A LOT more than you’ve been told to eat or thought you should be eating. This can feel alarming and uncomfortable, especially when you try to incorporate this information into your daily eating routines.
You don’t expect your car to run on empty, why ask that of your body? Fueling appropriately is truly a secret weapon. It’s not just about calories, quality of what you’re eating is very important but eating ENOUGH is a necessary step in feeling good, staying resilient and thriving in your life.
Reach out with any questions or curiosity if your fueling strategies are truly nourishing your unique body. My functional health program for women, The Wild Pursuits Method, is focused on that specific task - using strategic, in-depth functional medicine labs to get actual data on what your body needs, where any dysfunction exists and how to address each them in a targeted, efficient and effective manner.
Stay in pursuit,
Dr. Marsha✨