Skipping Meals: What is Happening in Your Body When You Don’t Eat Enough?
Too often, when trying to lose weight or change our lifestyle, people get stuck on a rollercoaster of extreme behavior. Binging, then skipping meals and starving is an all too common labyrinth that it’s very hard to navigate out of once you get started. Often, we unwittingly drastically reduce too many calories, which can harm us significantly. In this article, we’ll tell you what effects an irregular diet can have on your body.
Hormonal changes may occur
Unfortunately, skipping meals can seriously disrupt your hormonal balance. Insulin is a hormone that regulates your blood sugar levels. Eating irregular meals will cause your blood sugar level do drop significantly, and then compensate and shoot up when you eat your next meal. When you have insulin swings, you become irritable, shaky, exhausted, or anxious. Remember that diet only affects the condition of your body. It also causes undesirable mood changes.
A good way to keep your insulin level steady is to introduce regular meals. People with busy schedules and hectic lives can have a serious problem adjusting to this kind of plan, as it requires not only the knowledge but the time to compose a well-balanced meal. This is why a lot of people take advantage of kit delivery services like Blue Apron, Home Chef and Sun Basket (these give you all the ingredients and recipes).
If you don’t have time to cook, even if you have ingredients delivered then companies like Muscle Food, Meal Delivery Experts or Fresh Fitness Food are the perfect options. In this case, food delivery doesn’t mean junk food at all, because the caloric intake and nutritional balance are looked over by nutritionists and chefs. You get ready-to-eat meals delivered, and they are often composed to match your personal needs and preferences. No excuses or imbalances here!
You must eat to lose weight!
Each of us needs a certain amount of calories to maintain our basic life functions. Our cells need the energy and materials to rebuild and to thrive. Consuming less will actually have the opposite effect when it comes to burning fat – it can slow down your metabolism, and your body will start to deposit as much fat as it can. The metabolic rate drops to protect organs and normal body functions from starvation. This will have the opposite effect from what you’re hoping for.
Your body needs the right amount of nutritious food and exercise to achieve a healthy weight.
Understanding the difference between active calories vs total calories is crucial in managing your weight effectively. While total calories include your entire daily energy expenditure, active calories focus solely on the energy expended through physical activity.
You can get tired and touchy
Whether you skip meals or limit the type of food you eat, eating not enough calories also means that you are not getting enough nutrients. This way of changing your eating habits will not improve your overall well-being. It will instead make you feel bad, tired, or lethargic.
A healthy, balanced diet, even if it is to lose weight, should provide all nutrients while still maintaining a calorie deficit. Carbohydrate restriction can be particularly problematic when it comes to stabilizing your mood. Without enough carbohydrates, your blood sugar may fall too low because your body does not have enough glucose to use as fuel. Our bodies are fueled by the foods we eat, so if we don’t eat enough, our energy levels may also decrease. When you cut calories, it’s much harder to get all the essential elements your body needs to function properly.
Difficulties getting pregnant
When the body has insufficient nutrients, the energy it can produce from what it has at its disposal is primarily allocated to processes such as self-maintenance and blood circulation. As a consequence, it limits the production of hormones, which mainly causes less desire for sex, but also difficulties with getting pregnant. The energy cost of an entire pregnancy can reach 80,000 kcal. That’s a lot. In a situation where the body “feels” that the availability of energy from food is low (and no animal on earth deliberately limits energy consumption to lose weight – as humans do), it simply turns off reproductive function. This effect particularly threatens physically active and intensively slimming women.
Hair and nail problems
A deficiency of minerals and vitamins means that the condition of the hair and nails may deteriorate. Studies have shown that a deficit of protein, minerals, vitamins, and fatty acids contributes to hair loss and can affect their structure, which means that they can become thinner.
With a strict diet, even if it lasts a short time, there is a high risk that your hair will stop receiving ingredients that are important for appearance and vitality. It is because during weight loss, many products rich in macroelements and microelements that are guards of your beautiful appearance disappear.
Brittle nails may indicate an insufficient amount of some mineral. Most often, it is a lack of zinc. Zinc is involved in protein metabolism, subject to deficiency of slimming people, especially if they stopped eating various meals. If you want to supplement your diet with this mineral, put on your menu plant-based products like pumpkin and sunflower seeds, wheat bran, wheat germ as well as onions and garlic.
In turn, copper deficiency can hinder the absorption of iron, which will affect not only our health but also hair that will lose strength and elasticity. Important guardians of beauty are also selenium and B vitamins, especially biotin, which fortunately occurs in many foods, and it is difficult to find its deficiency.
Summary
It’s tempting to jump to extremes when you’re dieting – but drastically reducing calories and skipping meals will come back to haunt you. The best way to make a body change is to make a lifestyle change. Easy does it – change your habits and concentrate on self-care, not self-punishment.
