Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Re: sorry so long, deciding to post for help

Hi Bethany,

I can completely commiserate. Running around and being busy all day can make it so ridiculously difficult to eat ENOUGH. I find that not eating enough is a huge problem for my IBS because my stomach gets empty. I also find that when I'm not eating enough, that's when I start to gain weight and that nice little paunch reappears over top of my abs lol.

Seriously though, not getting enough calories slows your body's metabolism right down and makes it very poor at burning fat - and much better at storing calories at fat that it might not have had you gotten enough calories. So not eating enough can be a huge hinderance to losing weight - even though that seems to contradict lots of stuff we've been told about diets and dieting. You especially need more calories if you're exercing - and you seem to have a really good exercise program going.

The MOST important thing to losing weight is eating every 3 or 4 hours and not eating any large meals - the excess is stored as fat. So, this:

is probably not helping you too much! (and I confess that that has often been a very frequent eating pattern for me in the past)

Ok fine good advice Laurel, but all this is not not always so easy to do is it? I can totally understand. What I really like about fitday is it can be quite revealing as to, as you said, "what's really going on" - which you might not even be aware of. I remember when I started I found it shocking how few calories I was eating too, how little calcium I was getting, etc.

In fitday, on the 'home' page make sure you input your activity level to reflect your type of work - probably standing work? Then you don't need to input any of your basic daily activities as activities as it will already be calculating this for you. Just add in any exercise you do.

So I'm assuming then that your BMR is somewhere around 1500 calories? Your numbers for weight loss and maintenance look good to me, but yes as you said you're not eating enough calories. As for burning 1195 calories - is that ALL from activities you input? For example, for me today: total calories burnt was 2078 = 1335 BMR + 576 lifestyle + 173 yoga class. That 678 you put in is probably already accounted for by your lifestyle number, so as I said there's no reason to input that. See what I mean?

That doesn't change much though. Still keep aiming to get 1800 calories a day. I've made making food at home to bring with me when I'm out a huge priority and its helped me lots. I tend to eat pretty much the same thing everyday so it makes it easier, but that's not necessary.

I'm not sure what your work schedule is like, but when I was working full time in an office over the summer (I'm a student - at UWO - right now) I always ate small meals during my breaks (I had 2 15 min breaks in morning/afternoon and then 1 hr at lunch, but I only ever spent about 30 mins eating, then usually took a walk or something for 30 mins). So I had breakfast in the morning, then a small meal of some crackers and hummus and a banana or something during my morning break, then lunch (smallish) of rice and chicken or something, then a small turkey sandwich during my afternoon break, then supper when I got home and a snack in the evening. I ate so often everyone at work must have thought I was a food addict or something

- and they all used to say 'I'm so jealous that you can stay so thin when you eat so much!'

...But that's the key - I DON'T eat so much - I eat as much as body needs (and no less) and I eat often. It really really helps. As soon as you let your body get hungry, once you do eat it is MUCH more likely to store that food as fat. Eating enough and eating often also really, really helps with staying stable for IBS, at least for me - the time while I was working there was the most stable period I've had IBS-wise (it also helped that it was a very low stress temp job where I basically just surfed the net all day and got paid for it...lol)

OK well now I've just kept rambling on so I'll stop now:) I hope some of this was helpful to you!!

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