Could you be over-exercising?

How can this be fair? You exercise like an Olympian athlete nearly every day of the week, and eat so carefully that you have almost no fat or sugar (or taste) and yet the scales and your clothes tell you that not only are you not loosing weight, you are gaining weight.

Your first instinct may be to do even more exercise and eat even less however this will make the situation worse. What is going on? How does this work?

Amazingly enough it is caused by over-training and eating too little. Before you leap for joy and race out to buy all your favourite food that you have been denying yourself for months, and start to spend every night enjoying sitting on the sofa catching up with all your favourite shows there is a little more to it than doing nothing and eating everything.

Over training is not the same as a weight plateau and it is best to get professional advice before deciding that it is due to over training or something else, such as oestrogen dominance. Even better is to avoid getting to that point altogether.

When we train we gain muscle and muscle needs more energy than fat. It also needs good fatty acids (thinking olive oil and avocados) to help maintain and build muscle. Training whilst on a low fat diet is not sustainable. People often assume that we burn fat first but we actually burn muscle first if we don't eat because it is easier for our bodies to break down and utilise. Then we become a TOFE: thin on the outside and fat on the inside. We need fuel to build muscles which in turn will rev up our metabolism and eventually burn off fat. Fat loss is due to a slow burn.

We also need rest so that our muscles can recover. When we don't have rest days or rest certain muscle groups it is the equivalent of burning the candle at both ends. How energised do you feel after a week of late nights and early starts?

If you aren't sure how much you should work out, and what you should be eating then get some professional help. This can include lots of free resources on the Internet and professional help from people who have trained in particular fields.

When you work hard you want results, so make sure you are getting the results you deserve for all that effort.

love
Sarah