Your workout efforts could be going to waste – and even putting you at risk – if you’re not eating enough. Learn what happens when you don’t eat enough, and how to spot if you’re at risk:
What does the term ‘Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport’ mean?
REDs – or Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport – is a complex syndrome of a number of adaptations your body makes to conserve energy for its essential survival, and it’s the result of something called low-energy availability. Low-energy availability occurs when we’re not eating enough to support the exercise we’re doing.
What causes low-energy availability?
You can be in low energy availability for two reasons. One is what we call inadvertent where you don't realize how much you're burning, versus how much fuel you need. This is seen quite a lot in athletes, especially where training volume increases through phases of their season, and their appetite doesn’t match it, because exercise is an appetite suppressant. It can also be caused by a lack of nutritional knowledge about what you should be eating, or trying to eat a very, very clean diet. The thing is that when you’ve got high energy expenditure and you’re trying to eat a very clean diet, is that it’s very difficult to be able to eat the amount of energy to replace what you're burning, due to the sheer volume of ‘clean’ food required to hit caloric needs.
The other way you can be in low energy availability is through intentional energy restriction and sadly that's a large cause of the condition. It can be through eating disorders, but also things like disordered eating behaviors, trying to eat very clean, orthorexia, or actively trying to lose weight. There’s been a massive increase in this through the prevalence of social media and the rise of the fad diet, intermittent fasting, low carb - and other kinds of trends. People end up in low energy availability because they're thinking if they train more and eat less they’ll get the body they want, or look like that person on Instagram.
But, actually, it's counterintuitive. Your body does everything it can to stop losing weight and the health implications can last a lifetime.
Restricting what you eat, for whatever reason, when you're training hard doesn't mean you’ll lose weight. It does mean you are likely to do untold damage to your current and long-term health.
What happens when your body reaches a state of low-energy availability?
When we’re not eating enough, our body will always prioritise the immediate need – which is the exercise. It’s a survival thing – fight or flight. But to remain able to function, to keep the energy up for the exercise, it will down-regulate numerous other physiological functions so it can conserve energy for its survival. A lot of people will say: “Well, I’m not losing weight, so how can I be in low energy availability?” And the answer is that your body is very clever and will do everything it possibly can to maintain homeostasis. Our bodies haven’t yet caught up with our modern times of always having an abundance of food available, they still function with the premise that there may be a restriction in energy intake due to lack of availability. The body doesn’t want you to drop weight further, this a threat to its survival. It will down-regulate other functions it sees as ‘non-essential’, which all utilise its energy resources to conserve what is available for survival. Exercise is a type of survival – the body doesn’t know the difference between you doing a home workout, lifting weights in the gym, or running from a tiger on the savannah.
What are the symptoms of low-energy availability?
In females, one of the key ones is the downregulation of your menstrual cycle. It may become irregular or stop completely – which can be hard to spot if you’re on the contraceptive pill. The reason for this is that your body has downregulated the production of sex hormones as a way of conserving energy. If food is scarce, or you are under threat, it isn’t a safe time to have a baby. But obviously our sex hormones are involved in a lot more than just producing offspring. Estrogen (a key female and male sex hormone) impacts our bone turnover and bone deposition and when it is in short supply our bones can weaken, leading to stress fractures. The other thing we see is complaints around gastrointestinal issues – stomach bloating, diarrhea, constipation, feeling really full, really early, which can also happen with exercise. When we do a lot of exercise, our appetite can become suppressed. This sounds counterintuitive, but it’s due to how exercise can change the levels of hormones which drive our hunger, so we don't get the same signals to eat. People may also complain about intolerances – thinking, for example, they’re dairy or gluten intolerant, when it's actually that they're not eating enough and it’s impacting their physiological processes.
Not fueling your workouts can also affect your cardiovascular health. Low energy availability can increase your cholesterol, predispose you to coronary artery disease and cause cardiac arrhythmias. Mood is another key symptom of low energy availability; it can present as irritability, anxiety and/or depression. And, of course, it affects our performance in the gym.
We can't give our best or get the most (or much) from our workouts if we are chronically under fuelled, not recovered or are injured.
Restricting what you eat, for whatever reason, when you're training hard doesn't mean you’ll lose weight. It does mean you are likely to do untold damage to your current and long-term health.
When you are in low energy availability, you have decreased muscle protein synthesis, which will impact your ability to gain muscle and strength.
Is intermittent fasting a good idea?
If you go into a workout in a fasted state, you are training in low energy availability.
Your body will read that signal as that things aren't safe, and that you haven't got enough energy for the work that's required, and all the other physiological and metabolic processes required. Training in a fasted state is not going to bring about your best performance, or maximise the gains from your workout. We do know that being in low energy availability can negatively impact muscle adaptations i.e. muscle protein synthesis. Recent research found being in a state of low energy availability reduces muscle protein synthesis in trained females, who were on all on a high protein diet.
Intermittent fasting has become a bit of a trend, and it does work for some people, in some circumstances. But if you’re active and you’re going into a training session without fuelling beforehand, you’re putting yourself at risk of low energy availability. You're also not going to get the physical gains from a hard training session, because you're not fuelling it.
Your brain needs glucose to function, so your body will always partition glucose for the brain first. But we also need glucose for energy. We need fast access to fuel, and that’s what glucose provides. If we don’t have that, or enough of it, our bodies will access fuel from other sources, and that will be some from body fat, but it will also be amino acids (protein i.e. your muscles!). So you move into what we call a catabolic state. And that pathway to generating energy – ATP – is much slower. That’s why people in this state will often say, “I don’t feel like I have the energy to go to the gym”, “I don’t feel like I can go hard”. And that’s because you don’t have the access to the instant fuel – glucose – either circulating in your blood, or stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen.
What’s the best fuel for early morning workouts?
If you train first thing in the morning, it can be hard because we obviously don’t want to get up an hour earlier to eat an ideal full breakfast. So just have a banana or a piece of fruit or a few rice cakes with some jam or honey on them. Dried fruit is another good option. Something that’s easy and quick to digest, and convenient. Or you could even have a sports drink or a glass of orange juice – something with high sugar that will be fast to digest.
What you want is to be getting at least 45 grams of carbohydrate into you to fuel the morning workout. Avoid too much protein and fat close to a high intensity workout because it does tend to sit in your stomach, which can be uncomfortable. If you’re doing something strength-based, you might be able to eat it closer to the workout, but you want to have at least 30 minutes between eating and doing hard training.
How important are carbohydrates in our diet?
Nine times out of ten, athletes need more carbohydrates.
When it comes to carbs, okay you don’t want to be eating tons of sweets, cakes and cookies, but there is a place for energy dense foods in the athlete’s diet. If you’re asking someone to eat 3,500-4,500 calories a day, that’s a lot of broccoli, rice, and sweet potato. An athlete’s diet will not be inherently healthy because it’s too much volume to try to get the energy from just whole foods. Things like sports drinks and chocolate milk are really good and convenient if you’re moving around between classes. They're a good source of protein and carbohydrates, while being quick and easy to consume and digest.
This piece originally appeared at https://www.lesmills.com/fit-planet/nutrition/should-you-be-eating-more/
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