Eat To Perform Blog

Your body’s NEED for balance is a concept in scientific terms called homeostasis.

For this example I am going to use 1200 calories, because it’s been long held as the number of calories to lose weight. If you have ever under eaten for a long time (dieted) you have probably plateaued and probably got very frustrated in the process. You then wonder, “Why is this no longer working?” And the answer is homeostasis.

At this point, calories are difficult to control because you are hungry and frustrated. You keep banging your head against the low-calorie rock as long as possible and you use all of your willpower, multiple times.

But then you have a family function, and you ate 2200 calories on multiple days over a weekend. You step on the scale and you are up in weight significantly - so much that you are frustrated and just want to quit. Some people overreact, and others do in fact quit. Which is EXACTLY what you can’t do in that situation. When I talk about reversing back to normal, there needs to be a process in how that is done.

So then it gets worse. They eat low most of the week and eat loose on the weekend. This is problematic because your body is mostly under-eating and mostly not ready for the amounts of calories you are consuming on the weekend.

Now you start to test homeostasis on the top end until you realize you have to do something about it again. So you rinse and repeat this process over and over until you are either overweight, or overly rigid about how you eat.

There is no math that is favorable when you get trapped eating 1200 calories a day. Women need to be eating 2000+ calories and men need to be eating 2700+ calories. Just not all of the time.

The reason why they don’t all of the time is because when they eat 1200 calories during the week and 2200 calories on the weekend, their weight goes up. So the answer SEEMS like 1200 calories, but if you reversed it and 2200 calories was the answer, your metabolic math also reverses. And that’s the way your body is meant to function.

This article is a good companion article and talks about how to go up and down with your macros/calories to reach BIG goals.

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