Eating More Food Changed My Body, My Mind and My Life

For years, I believed eating less was the answer, but all it did was leave me exhausted, food-focused, afraid of gaining weight, and frustrated that my body never looked the way I wanted it to. In this episode, I’m sharing all the ways eating more food changed my energy, digestion, workouts, relationship with food, confidence, and ability to finally build the strong, lean physique I had been working so hard for. This is what happened when I stopped trying to shrink myself and started giving my body enough fuel to actually thrive. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You're more scared of overeating and afraid of what food is going to do to you when you should be more afraid of undereating because that is more harmful than eating the wrong quote unquote foods. Welcome back to the embodiment lab. My name is Addy, and today we are actually recording this podcast from a different location and a different setup because I felt like it. I don't know if you can hear, but it is absolutely downpouring and the thunder is going nuts. So we're gonna have a little cozy podcast recording sesh today. I decided that I wanted to record this using my mini mic. So I'm literally recording this on my phone on voice memos with my mini mics like hooked up to my phone, and I'm sitting on my couch just watching the rain pour down. And to be honest, this is a freaking blast. I did not feel like sitting at my desk and recording on my computer today. I don't know what it is. I just did not want to do that today. I could not be bothered, but this was the next best option, and I'm having so much fun. But before we get into things, I just want to talk about this is my first ever Florida summer. And I don't think that I understood really what I was getting myself into when I moved to Florida. For those of you who are new, in January I moved from Texas to Florida. I've grown up in Texas my whole entire life, so I'm used to the whiplash and the psycho weather that is uh Texas, specifically Dallas. Dallas has way more psychotic weather than the rest of the state. I think just because it's a little further north, we get a little bit more ice, like every single year, which is different. I did grow up in Austin, so like we did get snow from time to time, but it was like every couple years. Dallas, it's like every single year. But anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. Florida summers. Like, I knew that it rained every day for a couple minutes. I knew this. But I don't think I really understood what goes on. It's like it is fully sunny. Like, I'm not even kidding you. Two hours ago, I was like, maybe I'll go lay out at the pool and like get a tan. And then it's like within five minutes, this really big dark cloud just flies in, and then it's thundering and lightning and pouring, not just like a little drizzle, little sprinkle. No, it's like full-on torrential downpouring, which is crazy. So it's uh super dark, whereas, like I'm not even kidding, 15 minutes ago it was sunny as could be. So that's kind of interesting. Another thing that I'm learning is that this usually happens around like six o'clock every single evening. It's like the evening showers. I don't know. Um, this one actually hit a little early. It's at like it's 3 45 right now, so it's not quite as late as normal, but that's really interesting for me. So if you live in Florida, you know what's going on. I'm new to this, I don't really know. In Texas, it rains for like two weeks in a row, like back to back to back to back to back to where I'm like, oh my gosh, where is the sun? At least Florida, I get a little bit of both. I get a little bit of cozy vibes, and then I get the summer girl hot, humid vibes. So I get the best of both worlds. Um, honestly, I love it though. I love living here. It's been just amazing. And I keep having moments like every couple days where I'm like, I cannot believe that a year ago I was living in Texas, dreaming about moving here, and now all of a sudden I'm just like living here, and this is just my normal life. Like, what? That's actually crazy. Anyways, uh, rant about the weather is over. We're gonna get into today's topic, and I'm actually very excited about today's topic. I I don't know if you know, I literally come up with these topics like five minutes before I hit record. Like, I I don't there's not much planning that goes into this podcast. I just think about what I want to talk about and I yap until they get all of my thoughts out, and then we edit it and post it, and that's really all that there is. But today we are talking about how eating more food changed my life and all the different things that it affected. So, to give you a little bit of a backstory, I grew up a dancer. I feel like I say that sentence like 55 times a week. Like, hey guys, in case you forgot, I grew up a dancer, but yeah, I did. And with being a dancer comes with a lot of time spent in front of a mirror around a lot of girls who are also paying attention to their body. And that was definitely me. I was very hyper-focused on what the mirror was saying and reflecting back to me. And I cared a lot about my appearance and food and exercise and just how my body functioned and how it looked and all of the things. So I grew up eating not a whole lot of food, but I also was like my dad would brag about how much food I could eat because we had like a family barbecue. I could eat a lot of food, but it was kind of a back and forth, right? I decided at some point, I couldn't even tell you how old I was, but I was watching like YouTube videos, and I thought that you know the way that these people ate was how I should eat, and I never saw these people mess up or eat unhealthy. I saw them like super hyper-focused on the nutrients and eating super clean and healthy whole foods, all this stuff, and like that's fantastic. That is absolutely still what I preach, but a little bit of a different different lens, I guess, if you will. But I saw this and thought, okay, if I want to love my body and I want to be fit, then I need to eat perfectly. I can't ever have chips, I can't ever have ice cream, I can't ever go out and get fast food, I can't ever go out to a restaurant with my family. Like I can't ever have these fun foods, right? I need to eat foods that come straight from the earth, and that is literally it. And so I would get up and I would have probably like two pieces of toast and two lengths of sausage every single morning. Oh my gosh, I just had a little flashback. Yes, I did eat two pieces of toast and sausage. I would literally fold, I would still eat this to this day, but I would fold my little lengths of sausage into my toast. So it was like a little sandwich, and it was actually really on me. But that's probably about like 300 calories that I'm starting my day off with. And then I would have green tea because green tea was healthy. Coffee in my head was so unhealthy. I was gonna have a green tea. So that's what I started my day off with. And then lunchtime would come and I would have this is so weird. I'd have shredded chicken, you know, like from the can. I would have chickpeas that was seasoned in paprika, because I discovered paprika at the time, which is hilarious. And then I would have pickled jalapenos, and that was my lunch. And I used to think that was so yummy, but it was whole foods. It was chicken, it was chickpeas, it was jalapenos, and that was my lunch. And then I would have this teeny tiny little bowl of goldfish, and then I would have whatever my mom would make for dinner that night. And so I really wasn't eating a whole lot of food throughout the day. So whenever I did have, for example, we would go out to a Chinese restaurant, and my brother and I would always order like the whatever it's called, like the dinner plate, you know, like where it's a massive plate of he would get the chicken-fried rice and I would get the sesame chicken. So it's like two big plates of chicken-fried rice and sesame chicken, and then we would just uh portion out our servings of I would have a little bit of chicken-fried rice, a little bit of chicken, and we would eat that. I would have so much of that. I would make myself feel so full, so stuffed, and I would be like so incredibly bloated. I would look pregnant, like painfully bloated because I would get to dinner and I would overstuff myself because I ate uh basically nothing all day long. No wonder, right? So I went from that growing up, and I was just kind of known as the health, not like, oh, Addy eats healthy. Addie makes good choices with food, and then I would be around like family, and my family would be like, Whoa, you're going back for a third play, and I'd be like, Yeah, what what about it? You know, like I would just overindulge. I remember I would get home from like there was this dance intensive every June that was three or four days of dancing from like 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. And I would get home from that and I would absolutely raid the pantry because I just expended a whole lot of energy dancing all day long. I needed food and I would just go crazy. And I thought that I had like no control over food, none whatsoever. Probably like 20, 19, 20, somewhere around there, and I'd been working out for years at this point. I remember looking in the mirror at Planet Fitness and being like, I am working so freaking hard. I eat healthy, I eat clean. Why do I feel like my body is just like stagnant? Like, how much more work do I need to put in to grow my body, to change my body? And I wanted to build my glutes, I wanted to look curvy because I've always kind of just been a stick and I wanted to have some curve to me. So I wanted to like pack on some muscle, but I didn't want to get fat. I was terrified to get fat. So I thought if I ate the right things and I worked out that I would just be automatically granted the wish of having my dream body. When that didn't happen, it was really confusing. But I started tracking my calories one day because I was like, I'm really curious to see how much I'm eating. Turns out I was eating 11 to 1400 calories every single day when my maintenance is around like 2400 calories, and I went, oh, there it is. That is why I'm not building muscle. That's why my body looks the exact same. Because the gap from what I was giving my body versus what it actually needed, that was why I was stuck. Because here's the thing a little scientific-y tidbit here for a second. I think it's like Newton's law that's like you can't create something out of nothing, something like that. I was thinking that by going to the gym and breaking down muscle fibers, that they would just come back bigger. But you can't create something out of nothing. You have to have something in order for tissue to be built. In other words, I needed food to build that tissue, and I was not giving my body enough food at all. And so, of course, I was not growing. And you know it's really frustrating. And what I wish that more women understood was that if you are going to the gym, but your nutrition does not support your body, your activity levels, and your goal, you are working out for nothing. Your workouts are not effective, they don't work. Your workouts are a waste of time if you are not fueling your body properly, which sucks because then you're putting in a lot of effort. You're trying really hard, you're exhausting yourself. You're going through a certain level of pain because it's not painless to work out, but you're doing that for nothing. Think about it. That would change how you approach food. But getting into what food actually did for me when I had that realization, first of all, food helped me build my glutes. Food gave me shape, food gave me energy to build muscle with. Food absolutely changed my body. Absolutely changed my body. Not only that, but when I realized that I was able to eat more food than what I quote unquote allowed myself to eat, that helped me to be able to eat more food and not feel so guilty around eating food. So it healed my relationship with food. It took away the food guilt, it took away the food noise of like I have cravings and I'm a snacker and I need to eat absolutely everything at once. It took that away because I was finally giving my body enough food to be satisfied, full and satiated, which is amazing. So I no longer had to stress about food. So not only was I finally free from the mental struggle around food, I was also building muscle. And to top it all off, I was not getting fat, which was the most mind-blowing thing, because you would think that if you eat more food, you will get fat. But here's the deal. Is that you have a deficit, you have maintenance, and you have a surplus. Only one of those do you gain weight. That would be a surplus. If you are eating more than what your body needs, you will gain weight. But if you're eating exactly what your body needs, you will maintain weight. If you eat less than what your body needs, you will lose weight. The problem is that most people hear that you need to eat less and move more, and they take that to the extreme and they eat less and less and less to where they're not eating at a safe deficit of 500 calories below their maintenance. They're eating like a thousand to 1,500 calories under their maintenance. And they're not just there for a couple months and pulling out like you should with the deficit. They are there for months and months and months to years and years and years, which is so dangerous. And then when they reach this point where they are no longer losing fat, they think that they're it's just a genetic thing, or that they're just getting older and that their body just doesn't respond the way that it used to. Yeah, no, you're right. It's not because your metabolism slows down when you are eating less food than what your body needs. That is just how your body works. The good thing is that that can be reversed. It just means that you need to eat at maintenance for a little while before you attempt another deficit, a more strategic and intentional deficit than just mindlessly eating less and less because that's what you think that you need to do to lose fat. So eating more food made it easier to build muscle. It made it easier to stay lean because I had a faster metabolism. My strength went up in the gym. Workouts felt so much better. I got better pumps. I finally got over wanting to be smaller and had more of a mindset of wanting to build my body. I am the architect of my body. I want bigger shoulders, cool. I eat a little bit more, do some shoulder presses, some lateral raises, and I got bigger shoulders. Love that for me. I want bigger glutes, cool. Eat more food, do some hip thrust RDLs, all the things. They grow. It doesn't mean that I'm doing more workouts, it means that I'm just eating for my body and what it needs. Because if your body does not have what it needs, it will not give you what you want. Keep that in mind. Food noise got a whole lot quieter. I wasn't thinking about food 24-7 anymore. Cravings basically disappeared. I still have some from time to time, but it's nowhere near where it used to be. Cravings are normal, but like every single day, yeah, no, that's not normal. The urge to binge or overindulge went away. The guilt around food also went away. I had freedom to go out to eat because that food fit into the amount of calories that my body needed, which is super freaking cool. I stopped needing to earn food by working out, and I stopped needing to burn off food by working out. That's another thing that shifted was I no longer was like doing cardio before or after eating Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, literally anything like that. I had a switch in my brain when I realized that food equaled muscle, and that if I had a meal that was a little bit larger than normal, that I could go to the gym the next day and use that extra energy, use those extra carbs to build muscle. That was a huge switch for me, and I still use that to this day. I love it. I'm like, yep, let me fuel my workout for tomorrow. This meal is gonna give me bigger glutes, and I freaking love that. My energy got so much better. I remember working at HM when I was eating 1400 calories a day and working out six times a week. I would drag ass at work. Oh my gosh, I'd be so tired. So tired. But I remember when I started eating a little bit more, I was like, I am on fire. I have so much energy. I felt so good. Eat more freaking food. It changes literally everything. It helps with sleep too. If your body isn't getting enough food, it's not going to sleep very good, right? Then you're gonna wake up not feeling super rejuvenated from your sleep because your body processes nutrients and everything overnight. And if it just doesn't have a whole lot to work with, you're not gonna recover very well. Food is part of your recovery. That's another thing. Food is part of your recovery. So if you are extremely sore all the time, that is a really, really good sign that you're not getting enough food to repair your muscles. That's all I'm gonna say about that, because I think I talked about that last week. But, anyways, I also noticed that my periods became more regular, it they became less painful. I experienced less bloating around them, my digestion improved, I felt less puffy and inflamed all the time. All of these things happened from me making sure that I was eating enough food for my body. And I wish that more people understood this because it absolutely transformed not only my body, but my mindset. And with those two things, transformed it, also transformed my life and my quality of living and just everything, which is just so life-giving. Because who wants to sit around and nitpick their body and think about food and have this really weird, unhealthy approach to food all day, every day. Not me. Nope. No, no, no. That is not how I want to live. That's not how I choose to live anymore. And you don't have to live that way either. Food is something that is so healing, food is something that is so nourishing if it's used correctly. Undereating is honestly more detrimental than overeating because when you are not getting the nutrients that your body needs, that is harmful to your body. It is one of the worst things that you can do is to undereat. That's why you have to be so careful when you go into a deficit to make sure that it's not an extreme deficit and to make sure that you're not in it for longer than you need to be. Food is healing, food is amazing, food is power, food is the answer to everything. That is it for today's episode. I hope that you enjoyed. I kind of hoped that you could hear the thunder that was going on in the background because I feel like that kind of adds to the mood of this episode. And it felt super chill, super fun, super relaxing while I uh kindly yelled at you through my mini mic. But that's gonna be it for today's episode. If you enjoyed today's episode, feel free to let me know on Instagram. I absolutely love when you guys message me and you're like, oh my gosh, I love the podcast. This like spoke volumes to me. This meant the world to me. I love hearing that. So feel free to do that. Feel free to rate the podcast and give it a review and all the things, all the things that you do with podcast. But until next week, I will chat with you in the next episode. Bye.