Eat more

Insanity Day 47

Month 2 hasn’t been very satisfying for me yet. I’ve been feeling tired all the time, I feel like I’m not making the amount of progress I’d like with the workouts because I’m too tired to push as hard as I want and the scale that I expected to start moving down a bit more now that I’ve developed some muscle and my workouts have intensified hasn’t moved at all…except for maybe a pound in the wrong direction. I’ve been craving sugar more than I had been. My muscles have been extra shakey in the workouts this week and I felt like crying once. What the heck was wrong with me? It was just a work out!

I did a mental reflection of the food I’ve eaten the last 3 days tallying up the calories and realized I was starving myself eating only about 1000 calories a day on the days that I worked. A girl my height, weight and age who doesn’t exercise at all requires 1395 calories a day to meet her basal metabolic needs. I’ve been doing hour long insanity workouts  6 days a week and half the time following that workout with a 12 hour shift at the hospital. 1000 calories isn’t going to do it. No wonder I felt like crap. With weight loss as my goal at the activity level I’m at, I should have been eating at least 700-900 more calories a day than I was.

I never focused much on the nutrition side of insanity aside from cutting out sweets (although I still have an occasional dessert like last weekend for mother’s day and my nephew’s birthday) and my diet ginger ale/cranberry juice I used have all the time and incorporating more fruit and vegetables. I never bothered counting calories. In month two with the harder workouts they tell you to “eat more”. I didn’t change anything nutritionally in month 2. I guess I’ll have to do a little bit more food planning on my days off to make sure I eat enough on the days that I have to work so I can have the fuel that I need to get through my workouts and which should also decrease my sugar cravings. I was just hungry. I hate counting calories, but I’d rather know I’m getting what I need than feel like I’ve already done a workout before I even begin one. The calorie count started yesterday and I’m already feeling better with more food in me.