You’ve probably already heard the term, starvation mode, a time or two. After skipping breakfast growing up, you may have listened to your mom preach, “Eat your eggs, you’re going to starve!” The truth is, your mom had it right—starvation mode is a real thing—and it can cause real and serious damage to your body (and even your mental state). Keep reading to learn how to avoid accidental sabotage to your weight loss plan you may be doing right now.
Starvation Mode is Real (And It’s Really Bad For Your Body)
When you don’t eat enough for weight loss reasons, or simply because you’re too busy to stop and have a nutritious meal, your body responds by going into ‘panic mode.’ Your brain, whose job it is to allow you to survive, is most concerned about keeping you from being starving so that your genes (and you) can survive.
As you go through long stretches without consuming food (or you’re consuming food, but it’s ‘diet food’ or something that doesn’t contain many nutrients), it lessens the number of calories you burn off. This sounds like it’s actually preventing you from losing weight, but by not eating enough, your body thinks it’s near starvation, so it protects you from reaching that point altogether by conserving your energy.
Are You Sabotaging All Your Hard Work At the Gym?
When you eat enough throughout the day, your body is happy. As you burn off that fat stored in your fat cells, your metabolism is happy. But, when you don’t have enough fat stored in your cells to begin with, your body begins to do everything possible to store as much as it can to prevent weight loss. If you’re trying to lose weight, do you see how this can be a huge problem? Here’s some ways that you can eliminate your risk of even being in ‘starvation mode’ again—and get the weight loss and health benefits of a happy and healthy body you desire:
• Make sure every meal is ‘vegetable rich’. Fresh vegetables are full of essential nutrients your body needs to thrive, such as fiber, essential vitamins and magnesium. Load up on fresh greens, carrots, cauliflower, tomatoes and spinach. Put them in eggs for a morning meal, or top them on a grilled chicken breast or alongside grilled shrimp for dinner.
• Dominate your meal plan with real, whole foods. Your rule of thumb to avoid ‘starvation mode’ should be to eat things that only come from the earth—not out of a can, in a box, or anything that contains an ingredients label.
There’s no need to ever sabotage the hard work you’ve been doing at the gym when you focus on providing your body with nutrient rich food. Follow a healthy, unprocessed eating plan and you’ll never reach starvation mode again.
