Side effects of not eating enough calories.

Absolutely foul mood. When I'm under eating I get extremely unhappy. I've been known to faint too. Ugh.

My symptoms woule be:

I feel spaced out.
My eyes go all kind of starey and I find it hard to focus.
My mind becomes foggy.
I feel tired.
I find myself biting and picking at my fingers. ( no, I'm not trying to eat them!)
I feel hungry ish but for some reason don't really fancy anything to eat.
I feel kind of buzzy.

I still get this feeling from time to time, even though I am eating enough calories throughout the day (1900 daily). In fact it happened two days in a row last week, both times after having a cinnamon bagel just after lunch, but that could be a coincidence. It doesn't happen all the time, but often enough that I'm considering going to the doctors about it, just to be on the safe side :ohwell:

Those "symptoms" are considered normal for my age(lol)

You ladies can add missed periods on the list too if you don't net enough calories for five consecutive days.

What? No. It takes a couple of months of under eating before your periods stop.

Editing to add: That is a function of body fat %, not just under eating. A person with very low body fat might stop periods with only five days, but someone with plenty of body fat won't.

So wrong on both accounts of duration and body fat.

http://jcem.endojournals.org/content/88/1/297.full

I find that I am tired and have very little energy.

When I first heard about IPOARM - link is
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/654536-in-place-of-a-road-map-2-0-revised-7-2-12

I was very sceptical. I mean it sounded crazy. I was eating around 1200 cals and my weight loss had stalled for a few weeks and this link to calculators resulted in hearing that I should be eating MORE!!! Anyway after doing a bit more research and getting 2nd and 3rd opinions from other websites, checking the success stories of people who had made the change, I finally felt that it was at least worth a try.

I slowly each day upped my calories and now eat between 1600 and 1800 calories and tweaked my macros. GUESS WHAT...this works folks, despite eating all those calories the scale is beginning to fall again.

Most importantly, I feel so good, my body just feels right. I am not so tired, I am never hungry and I am really beginning to enjoy my food. This is a method of weight loss that I will have no problem in sustaining, when I finally reach my goal.

Thanks HelloitsDan for taking the time to research and for bringing this information to MFP

I've read this and upped my calories to 1600 too, changed my macros to force myself to eat more protein :P . I'm wondering.. how long after you made the changes did you start seeing a change in the scale? Doesn't matter if it's little change as long as it's steady, i know. I'm just curious. I'm not 100% sure if 1600calories is the right number for me and I don't know for how long I should give that number a try before resuming if it's working or not (have been eating 1600c for around 2 weeks + exercising an average of 500c a day -except sundays. Lost just inches)


For me the major side effect of not eating enough is being b*tchy.. My roommate sometimes does it and not only she's almost mean jajaj but also feels kinda dizzy and more prone to low blood pressure. For me, everytime i realise i don't feel so good my first thought is to think "I'm probably hungry" so i eat something even if it's small and wait like 10/15 min to see if that was it or not.

Low blood pressure means you'll feel faint, dizzy and sometimes get tunnel vision. I would consume more salt and potassium.

If I don't manage my food well my hair falls out, due to lack of protein. This happened when I didn't have access to food.

bump!!

My sophomore year of college I went a couple months eating significantly less calories than what I was used to (probably somewhere between 500-700 calories a day). It wasn't intentional at first, I was just busy and ate less. Then I started to see myself lose weight pretty quickly and kept intentionally eating a very small amount of food each day because I liked the results. Then, after about 2 and a half months of doing this I started having panic attacks. I don't remember if I had any symptoms prior to the attacks, mostly just generalized anxiety which I didn't connect with the lack of calories. But when I started having those panic attacks almost on a daily basis it finally clicked that it had to be related to my eating. I started eating more often and normal portions again and my panic attacks and anxiety went away completely. I now realize that I was subjecting myself to disordered eating and that my body was reacting to it's lack of energy input and nutrition by going into panic mode. I can't really speak much to the short term effects of a significant calorie deficit, but the long term effects can be pretty scary.

Back in the day before I got educated about proper weight loss, I would under eat.

I would be:
tired
sleep poorly
not want to do anything that required movement
my vision would darken when I stood up too quickly

Luckily, I was never one to stick to deprivation diets so I never suffered from long term effects of eating to little.

Never again.