Diet related: is this normal?

[nottinghamblue]

I'm hoping one of the PH masses could give me a bit of an explanation.

About a month and a half ago I decided to overhaul my diet, eating 'clean' foods and using myfitnesspal to keep my calorie intake at around 1400 (regularly it will be around 1200 though) per day, bearing in mind i'm a fairly big guy with (according to MFP) a BMR of 2900.

But yeah, back to the point, i've had a couple of cheat days, which consisted of a mcdonalds and a take away fish and chips and afterwards iv felt absolutely terrible, physically. Before I started the diet I could eat these foods every day and not even think about it but now my body seems to completely hate them.

Is this just me becoming a normal person and not liking these sorts of foods? or is it my body telling me there is something up with my diet, such as entering the dreaded 'starvation mode'?

thanks in advance for any explanation/help/advice anyone could give me.

[davepoth]

What's the aim of the diet?

I'd say you've cut too hard - it would be better to reduce less, and exercise more, as that will keep a better balance of nutrients in the body, and not send you into starvation mode.

[DukeDickson]

I'd say it could well be as much to do with what as much as quantity.

Eat sludge, give up & then occasionally go back to probably isn't much removed from going dry for a month+ then going out on the beer, or quitting the fags then smoking a pack & wondering why it is somewhat less good. Possibly nice at the time but the aftermath is quite probably more painful than it once was, as it invariably is.

TBH, I wouldn't see it as a necessarily bad thing.

[Stoatman]

HI, I have experienced this in the past. I lost alot of weight during which, I ate perfectly clean foods all <5% fat content. Had nothing for ages . However, now and again if I did have something with a higher fat content or any bad junk, I felt sick and felt rotten for an hour or two. In the end this helped me really as it put me off junk food even more !.


Oh , and that is not alot of calories !. How big are you now and what are you trying to achieve ?.

[Hoofy]

It's nothing to do with dieting and all to do with going very healthy. When I stopped eating meat (and indeed anything other than soup) for a couple of months after a bowel op then went back to it, a normal sized steak made my stomach hurt.

If you keep at it, you'll probably get used to burgers and kebabs again but then if you currently have a problem with them and they're not good for you then perhaps it's a great opportunity to keep your lifestyle healthy.

And, yes, you're eating too little. You've nicely slowed down your metabolism.

[goldblum]

Unless the food has some kind of poison or substance acknowledged to be questionable i.e. vast amount of food colouring etc there is no reason whatsoever you should

feel bad.Psychosomatic guilt?

Forget about internet myths such as 'starvation mode',you'd have to be in a camp in Somalia first.

[Mr GrimNasty]

The body gets used to processing large quantities of fat, salt, sugar etc. if you build up to eating large quantities every day it is no problem. If you then eat healthily and eat less food, you'll produce less bile, less insulin, etc. and your stomach will shrink.

If you then suddenly eat a massive meal, besides stretching your stomach which could be uncomfortable, your body simply won't be able to metabolise and process the fat/salt/sugar etc. and won't be able to regulate the blood chemistry. So you will feel like carp.

[goldblum]

Mr GrimNasty said:

If you then suddenly eat a massive meal, besides stretching your stomach which could be uncomfortable, your body simply won't be able to metabolise and process the fat/salt/sugar etc. and won't be able to regulate the blood chemistry. So you will feel like carp.

I'm curious about this...why would your metabolism,which obviously consists of a lot more than just your digestive system,be unable to process fat,salt and sugar from

a one-off massive meal? Perhaps a chemical reaction cannot occur or some enzyme release is blocked? If you're not ill in some way why would your body not be able to

'regulate the blood chemistry' ? Do you know where various elements of human blood come from in the body and what effect one meal will have on,say,long bone stores

of red bone marrow and erythrocyte release? I only ask because the anatomy module I'm in the middle of for my degree doesn't cover the results of the "one-off massive meal' scenario and I'd like to have all bases

covered for my next exam.

[nottinghamblue]

I was at about 265-270 pounds after the xmas period when I started the diet. I'm aiming to get down to around 205 is, maybe a bit below and then bulk up in muscle to 205.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know much about it, and at the beginning I have just gone of a very basic calorie deficit idea. I'm not constantly hungry at 1400 (note this is when taking exercise calories into account). Also, to be fair I have a feeling the calorie tracker on MFP is a little under estimating, so this may mean im eating more than I think, but i'm not hungry in between meals, I just eat if i'm hungry. I took a few tips from the 'lose a stone in a month thread' and have basically applied that to my diet. I'm sure as I get closer to my goal i'll have to implement more complicated diet and exercise strategies to get results.

I have had results so far, I had lost 20 pounds when I checked a few days ago but was just wondering as to what happened the other day.

In terms of exercise, I have been exercising 5 times a week most weeks, including two 2 hour sessions of Muay Thai per week (hence the pretty specific weight goal). I had been doing this amount of exercise for around 4 months leading up to Christmas however left my diet the same and saw next to no difference in my weight.

[nottinghamblue]

Again, thanks for the help.

[Hoofy]

nottinghamblue said:

I'm not constantly hungry at 1400 (note this is when taking exercise calories into account).

I have no idea what exercise calories are. Do you mean 1400 is after you subtract the calories burnt through exercise? If so, then that would make sense but it's a bizarre way of specifying how much you're eating as 1400 immediately screams "crazy stupid diet" and "drop in metabolic rate" so in one simple number, what are you eating in calories a day?