How to Know if You Are Eating Enough: 5 Signs You Are Under eating

If you’ve ever wondered, “Am I eating enough?” ... this video is for you. I’m breaking down 5 key signs your body may not be getting enough fuel (and what to do about it). From low energy and constant food thoughts to disrupted hunger cues, these signals aren’t failures — they’re your body communicating with you. 

You’ll learn:

 🍽️ How to tell if you’re eating enough without tracking or restricting 

💡 Why your body fixates on food when it’s underfed 

🔥 What steady energy and satisfaction actually feel like 

💤 How consistent nourishment helps regulate hormones, mood, and hunger cues 

Your body isn’t broken... it’s just asking to be fed consistently. Watch to learn how to rebuild trust and finally feel nourished, balanced, and free around food.

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Transcript

Why Eating Enough Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So, how do you know that you are eating enough? I get this question so often from my clients as they're starting to navigate intuitive eating and working on their relationship with food to build more trusting, respectful relationship with food. And why is it so important to intuitive eating? Why is eating enough so important to that? Why is it so important to feeling in control of food and not feeling out of control and binging? Why is that such an important thing? Well, eating enough is going to tell your body that it is safe. It doesn't need to keep reaching and sending these strong cues. It can trust you. And so it's very foundational to be eating enough while you're practicing or going into the practice of becoming more trusting with your body, eating intuitively, letting go of rules. So, how do you know you're eating enough? These are the questions that I ask with my clients consistently to navigate with their own body if they are feeding it appropriately. So, number one question Is your energy steady? Is your energy, do you have energy throughout the day? Is it steady or are you crashing? Are you feeling exhausted? Are you needing caffeine pick-me-ups throughout the day? Are you feeling like you can't get through your day? Oftentimes when pe people blame themselves for being exhausted, and they usually blame like I I remember a time when I was not eating enough and over-exercising. And specifically one time I was at the mall with my my my family, and I was like shaming myself for like, oh, it's because you're unhealthy and you didn't make the right food choices and you're out of shape, you're not in shape. That's why you're exhausted. That's why you don't have energy. That's why you feel like you need to get to bed right now and you can't be in the moment with your family. No, it's because I didn't give myself proper fuel, consistent fuel, and enough fuel when I would eat, it wouldn't be enough. And so if you're exhausted throughout the day, don't shame yourself. Ask yourself, am I hungry? Am I not eating enough food? And experiment. Eat more food, see how it makes you feel. Does it give you a pick-me-up? Um, I'm laughing, but it's sad. Um, it's really, it's it's so tough that we go to this place, this place of shame rather than this place of, am I respecting my body? Am I giving it enough fuel to do all the things that I'm asking it to do today? So, anyways, that this is gonna be the first question I ask is is your energy stable and consistent? Um, you have to be eating both consistently and enough for your body to be able to focus on your day and give you the energy to do all those things and not be, you know, drained and also always thinking about food. Number two, does movement drain you? Whether you're walking, you're stretching, you're doing yoga, you're really cranking and out of the gym, lifting weights, doing some HIT workouts. You shouldn't feel exhausted going into exercise or while exercising. And there's a certain kind of exhaustion you should feel after. One that's good and fueled and nourishing, and one that is like you just depleted your body, which didn't have the energy to do it in the first place. And you shouldn't be recovering for days after exercise, feeling like you can't function throughout your day because you just did a hard exercise. You should, if you're eating enough, your movement is not gonna feel drained. You're gonna go into exercise feeling, all right, let's do this. Um, you're going to be doing the exercise, of course, feeling tired and like you're exercising your body, but you're not gonna feel depleted like your tank is empty. You're also gonna be able to recover quicker from those exercises, like I already mentioned. You're gonna be able to, it's not gonna wipe you out and wipe your body out for the you know the next several days because of the exercise that you put it through. Number three, are you satisfied after you're done eating? Are you satisfied with meals? This is an important question to ask because if you're eating enough, you shouldn't still be thinking about food. You should be satiated and satisfied. You shouldn't be completing a meal and then thinking about when your next meal comes in, when you can eat next, when you're allowed to eat next. You should be leaving that meal feeling satisfied and satiated. And those two things, satisfied, meaning um the, or I'm I'll start with satiated, satiated. You would no longer have those hunger cues and feel like you're still needing energy and satisfied, you should feel satisfied with what you just ate. It should have been enjoyable, and that's oftentimes when you know, sometimes people feel satisfied when they both have a meal that they enjoy or something in that meal that's very enjoyable, and then they're able to have, you know, this that sweet afterwards too that adds to that satisfaction and then completes the satisfaction for that meal. So you should not still be hungry, you shouldn't be looking for other food afterwards. If you are, that means you're you didn't eat enough, you're not satisfied, and you're not satiated. Feeling comfortably full and satiated and satisfied is your body saying, Awesome, thank you, I feel good, let's move on. Number four, your body functions optimally and normally. When you're eating enough, your body is able to do its job and all of the jobs that it has. This means regular digestion. Your digestion is good. You're able to sleep throughout the night without waking up consistently. You have stable moods, you have healthy hormones and healthy libido. You have a steady temperature, you're not always freezing. For those who menstruate, you have a consistent menstruation cycle, and all of their functions are just functioning optimally. What happens when you don't eat enough is your body needs to get those calories from somewhere and it needs to slow down the calories that it's burning. And so it's gonna turn off those things that it doesn't need, right? There's science and research that shows, hey, I'm not getting enough food. I'm gonna shut down my reproductive system because I don't need it at the moment because there's no way I'm reproducing because I'm not getting enough food in. It's going to stop sending the warmth to your extremities because, like, just put on gloves. We cannot afford that right now. It's gonna slow down your heart rate. It's gonna just slow down all your functions or slow down some of them. And I also don't want you saying, hey, those things don't happen to me, so I enough much must be eating enough. No, no, no, no. Pay attention to that, that's that part of you saying, no, I don't need to get uncomfortable and eat more. Yes, you do. If any of these apply to you, and you know truthfully and internally, or if you're not eating enough, if any of these apply to you, even if one does not resonate, like these bodily functions, maybe you're restricting, but you still have your period, awesome. That doesn't mean that you are getting enough food. That means that your body is more resilient than other bodies in certain ways, or it just acts differently. And number five, and this one's so important, I love to talk about it, but number five is is food always on your mind? If you were eating enough, food would not always be on your mind. But food is on your mind when you're not eating enough because it's your survival mechanism. Your body is saying, feed me, feed me, feed me, I need food. I'm not gonna turn off these cues, I'm going to keep having you think and obsess about food because I'm in need of food to properly function. When clients are underfueled, a constant obsession around food happens. You either are constantly hungry, but your hunger cues do turn off, but you're still thinking about food, you're manipulating it, you might be looking at recipes, you might be baking, but not eating the baking that you just made. There's a constant analysis, and food is always on your mind. This is not lack of control, this is hunger. This is a cue that you are not eating enough because once you start eating enough, your body is not, it's gonna start to be able to think about all of the other things because it's getting its basic needs met. And once you eat enough, those food thoughts start to calm down. So those are the five questions I would ask yourself today to assess if you are eating enough. And this is something you can do on your own, and you can start connecting with your body, pushing your discomfort and getting to a place where you don't have to think about food all the time, where you have energy, where your body's functioning optimally, and you can become friends with food and your body.