I try running, stair climbing and stretching every day and I try not to eat to feel full up. I don’t know if this is a stupid idea, but I’m sure dieting involves feeling moderately hungry, which is what I do now.
Sometimes, after a long hard workday I feel so hungry I eat a lot for dinner, meaning I don’t have to have breakfast before I start working out. I don’t know if this is also a stupid idea. Do you have a small breakfast before starting your work out in the morning before going to work?
A variation of this involves eating only whole grains at night before going to sleep because sometimes that’s the only thing at hand.
Should I change anything?
You’re doing great. All reasonable choices. There are many paths to success and you are finding what works for you. Keep up the good work.
Dieting doesn’t necessarily mean feeling hungry all the time. Yes, for some it might feel that way, because they are used to eating large quantities unnecessarily. But in general, dieting for most people means eating better: Less processed, sugary foods and more vegetables and wholegrain products. These tend to have fewer calories but more volume, so eating the same amount in terms of volume helps lose weight already.
Sometimes, after a long hard workday I feel so hungry I eat a lot for dinner
Binge-eating tends to be a lot more problematic. I’m not a nutritionist, so I can’t help you at this point, but you should put some research into preparing a meal plan that provides your body everything it needs.
Do you have a small breakfast before starting your work out in the morning before going to work?
That entirely depends on you. Some people prefer some light breakfast in the morning, others don’t eat anything at all. For myself, I can hardly get going without eating something in the morning. At the same time, I notice my energy level highly depends on what it is that I eat. I.e. toast with some sugary spread on top, sometimes even upsets my stomach. My regular oatmeal with nuts and fresh fruits takes some time to prepare, but it is a lot healthier.
Impossible to really answer that. Your body weight is the end result of many, many habits.
You have described only a few of your habits, and without most details. But even if we knew all, really all of your habits with all specific data, there is still no such thing as a calculator formula for the end resulting weight. Bodies act differently.
Become aware of what you are doing, stick to your changed habits (at least three weeks before reviewing any change), and then watch your weight regularly. Write things down daily, or twice a week, or weekly. Do not look for a daily success, but yearly (and maybe weekly too).
It also depends a bit on what you eat. Candy bars for example will have more energy than you need long before you feel full up.
Eating right before you sleep can be a problem. It can reduce the quality of the sleep as well as the quality of the digestion. Additionally, you move less while asleep, so basically the body has no other choice but to store the extracted carbohydrates as fat.
What are your goals?
Some athletes will carb load before an event, so that there’s more glucose available for their muscles to perform during the event. This has to be done just before the event, because glucose is not stored in the body, so it’s taken out of the blood pretty rapidly. So if you need this extra performance enhancement it has to be just before the event. This is also a reason many pre-workouts will have lots of glucose/carbohydrates ingredients
Other athletes will do ketosis training, and do the event with no glucose. This is usually more endurance events. That benefit from long sustained energy consumption for multiple hours, rather than the short bursty glucose-based energy consumption. (Marathon versus Sprint for example)
You mentioned dieting, and needing to feel hungry, if one of your goals is weight loss: it’s better just to have a healthy diet, don’t lose weight to get healthy, get healthy to lose weight. There are many diets people use to achieve their metabolic health goals, the diet I’ve seen to be most effective for myself and those around me, is a low carbohydrate high-fat diet. But again it’s about your goals.
Following a diet where you feel hungry, is fighting an uphill battle, it’s doing it on hard mode. Hungry diets are also usually not sustainable long-term. So you might want to investigate a different option
don’t lose weight to get healthy, get healthy to lose weight.
I like this!!
Great. I stole it. It was from one of the lectures on the low carb down under channel, I think it was one of the videos talking about the hormonal model of weight control.
This is too vague to give an in depth answer as we don’t know your ultimate goals or your diet as a whole but not eating before working out isnt bad. Some diets such as intermittent fasting involves fasted work outs.
Changing both your diet and work out habits can be hard, especially if you do it all at once which can become demoralising and hard to maintain over the long term.
I encourage you to research different approaches towards your ultimate goal and make smaller changes over time with a view of changing your outlook on food and exercise for the long term and making it stick.
