Eat To Perform Blog

The other day I was talking to a lady that said she was scared to eat more. So I started asking more because, frankly, why would she be talking to me if everything was good but let me step back for a second.

I have 9 days left of my fat loss cycle. My sleep isn't great (though luckily I have a relatively flexible life so I can nap), I have to keep my activity in place for a lot of reasons but AT BEST I am 50% and I go from constipated to not constipated depending on the day.

So I asked her, do you have any of those symptoms? She admitted to two of the three. The third was activity, she isn’t active because she doesn’t have the energy for activity.

But here was the kicker. I am losing 1-2 pounds a week right now AND I’M NOT SURE IT’S WORTH IT. That said, it ends in 9 days (or at least this round does).

So I asked her, how is your weight loss going and she said her weight is up, quite a bit (she mentioned 20 pounds). So then I asked her how much she is eating and she said, “on a good day I probably get 1,000 calories in”.

So let’s review:

The lady sleeps 5 hours a day.

Her digestive system isn’t great.

And she is basically sedentary as a result of those two things.

On top of that she is scared to eat more than 1,000 calories.

Now before you say she has an eating disorder you also need to know she was down 50 from her high.

But with the weight gain she is scared she will just gain it all back.

If you google torture you will see that virtually everything on this list is common torture techniques but she is doing it to herself FOR A RESULT SHE IS NOT GETTING!

That’s how fucked up this fear of food thing gets. And I agree, she is probably at risk for an eating disorder now which is why you shouldn’t be getting dieting advice from sunshineupurbutt321 on reddit.

Let me also add that no amount of consistently doing what she is doing will fix this problem so let’s stop saying to people that their problem is consistency. A bad plan consistently done becomes a worse plan.

At some point you have to lose your fear and do the more healthful thing.

And don’t get me wrong, her net 30 pounds of weight loss could be a contributor to a healthier physical lifestyle but you have to also consider MENTAL HEALTH in the equation.

Let’s all be real here for a second, most people would never get to where she is because logic kicks in at some point. In fact, for almost everyone it kicks in very early.

Losing weight, changing habits and maintaining those habits while normalizing food takes effort.

But effort can go too far.

When you get to this phase there are only two options, eat more or eat less and since eating less really is part of the problem. You have to reset to kick things back going again. Otherwise you never reach your goals and that’s often when people make extreme choices.

If you only know what you know and you are relying on opinions rather than expertise maybe coaching can really help you go farther. The first thing we would do in this instance would be to normalize this woman’s calories. Actually, she signed up and that’s exactly what we did. If you only know what you know and feel stuck.