so I'm on week 4 and for some reason I just seem to be really craby is this normal, things that usually don't bother me are getting on my nerves. I do enjoy exercise and feel Good afterwords but through out the day I just seem agrivated by the littlest things.

are you eating enough calories? is it the lack of food that's making you crabby?

Have other things in your life changed so that you're stressing more than usual?

Has a drastic change beenmade to your diet so thatyou've cut out something you once had a lot of - like caffeine?

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Are you taking any vitamins? I noticed that when I started taking a daily multivitamin and fish oil that my mood became noticeably more pleasant. Also, I read in women's health last month that taking calcium is supposed to help too. It helps to regulate your hormones (at least that's what I remember the article saying off the top of my head).

And if you have cut calories to the extreme, that will also make you really bitchy.

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Vitamin B is supposed to help with that as well- especially for people who suffer from PMS symptoms...

I just prefer to embrace my inner bitch and wish I'd let her run free more often...

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“Knowledge is power” – Sir Francis Bacon, philosopher
“Knowledge shared is power multiplied”, Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the semiconductor, co-founder of Intel

I am actually interested in this as well... An answer from someone in the know (like steve) would be excellent... Every time that I get into serious training, I turn into an unpredictable jerk (like now), where I could snap on people for the stupidest of reasons. I always just figured that it was my increased testosterone levels due to my lifting, but that always seemed like a cop-out answer.

Maybe I'm just naturally a jerk, and when I'm running around with low blood sugar I just don't like taking anyone's garbage... but there HAS to have been studdies done on this... and if one person can find an obscure medical reference, I'd bet its the guy that rhymes with "Reeve"

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You're just an ass P2B.



No, honestly I don't have a concrete answer. Dieting screws with your hormones. Hell, the 'starvation mode' is caused primarily by shifts in hormones. Once you start screwing around with hormones... all kinds of crap can happen. Some of it will certainly alter moods. Check this out:

For those who don't know, the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, leptin, etc all play roles in human metabolism. So basically screw around with your normal food intake and things are doing to adapt.... hormones and the endocrine system being part of this.

ETA: I'll add that it doesn't help that every natural inclination a human possesses is to eat. So disallowing yourself to do this is going to have obvious negative side effects.

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well for my self I have started eatting better of course i stopped drinking sodas if Iwant something with sugar I'll have a sobe but as for food I took out all the fast food and eat alot of veggies here is an example of what I ate yesterday
7:00morrnig
3 egg whites and 12oz of green tea
10:00snack
orange
12:30 lunch
salad
1/4 lettuce head
1/2 cucumber
1/4 jicama
with lemon juice
12oz. green tea
2:00snack
1/2 bag of popcorn
then bettween 5-6:30 dinner (depending what time i get home)
1/2 porkchop
zuccini
brocoli
and water
I currently drink about 7-9 pints of water through out the day so it seems I am always eatting or drinking something am i not eatting enough?

Interesting, Steve

Thanks

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Do you spend your days counting the hours you're awake
and when night covers the sky you find yourself doing the same
MH4L

Morning,

I generally get mood swings only during PMS, at which time I'll alert my family that bothering the Mommy would be an extremely unwise thing to do.

So giving advanced notice to friends/family might be a good thing.

Enjoy,

Barbara

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Mina,

I took a little further look into what you are eating and I looked to see if you had a diary where you listed any other days' food lists. You really are not eating enough and you are missing out on soooooo many nutrients. This is why you are moody. Your body thinks it's starving which brings out aggression (20/20 did a study with men on this and this happens for the reasons that Steve listed above with hormonal imbalance). You should plug your daily intake into a food calculator (FitDay - Free Weight Loss and Diet Journal I'm sure that someone has mentioned this to you by now) and take a look at what you are actually eating. You could eat twice as many veggies as you are now but that's really all you seem to be eating on the whole. You are missing out on protein which among other things, preserves muscle mass. When you lose weight, fat isn't the only thing lost... you can lose muscle as well. And I think lots of ppl forget that one very important part of your body is a muscle... the heart. So it's not just calves and triceps... it's your heart, too. Don't lose weight only to end up with a weak heart. You are also missing out on fat. Fat has lots of benefits... it's not the big, bad werewolf that everyone makes it out to be. There are different types of fat. Some are unhealthy, but not every carb or protein is healthy either.

Another big concern with your daily intake is that your body is going to refuse to lose weight somewhere down the line and then you'll be posting for help on your plateau and everyone is going to give you the same advice, but you'll be hooked on all the false glory you've had to that point; or worse, you'll hit a plateau and give up, regain all the weight, etc.

It's good that you eliminated fast food and soda. They aren't the healthiest food items. But veggies are not the only answer, a well balanced diet is the best answer. Veggies, fruits, lean meats, grains, legumes, good fats... you need all of that. I'll put a link here that gets distributed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which I have always thought of as a good university for their studies, etc. It's a cheat sheet of sorts. It's the most basic reason of why you need the three macro-nutrients. And somewhere else on this board Leigh P. posted articles that tackle each of those more in depth and explains why this and why that. Those are really informative, IMO. Hopes this helps.

McKinley Health Center - Macronutrients: the Importance of Carbohydrate, Protein, and Fat - University of Illinois

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you know i didn't realize i was missing so many nutrient because i figure the eggs were protien, jicama fruit cucumber fruit/ veggie(don't know),lettuce veggie, and i do get protien for dinner the only thing i think is missing is carbs and dairy I feel full practically all day so I'm not tired and well really this is the first time that I am making a consious effert to lose weght, back ohh lets say 9 years ago I worked as a wildland firefighter and well I used to run 4 miles a day plus physical training and there we used to eat alot but I feel that this time it is different because I have weight to lose not just tone and get fit I guess it a combination of both that i want to do cause like many people i don't want to have extra skin hangging if it happens at least i know to expect it as long as i lose the weight(sorry I went off subject)

You might enjoy the collection of these two posts...

Symptoms of Fat Loss Part 1 (The Drain Effect)

I have talked about this a TON lately with my fat loss clients and board members.

Let's run down real quick and shortly what fat loss is.

Fat loss is the removal of stored body fat from your body. In order to achieve fat loss you need to be in a deficit of energy. Meaning that what it takes to run your body for a day you need to be negative in. If your body need 2000 kcal of energy to run, and you feed is 1500 calories, it is in the negative by 500 calories.

Now let's take away the numbers and think about what that really means.

Your body in order to function properly needs a certain amount of energy. One could compare this to say a flashlight. Oh here comes another analogy!!!



A flashlight running on 100% perfect charged batteries shines bright, is lucid, and performs perfectly when needed for a tasks.

What happens when those batteries start to drain of energy?

The light is less bright, performance is shaky, and the crystal clear stream of light is now muddy.

You know how it is when the batteries are almost dead, you start to bang the flashlight to get those extra jolts of connection just before that moment where the fat lady has sung and no more power.

NOW, imagine your body is that flashlight and as time goes on your batteries are running low. How are you going to feel?

-Less lucid, foggy
-easily emotional
-fatigue
-hunger
-harder to wake up in the morning
-muscle soreness
-sadness

These are not symptoms of overtraining...these are symptoms of fat loss.

Think about it folks, you are removing a physical substance from your body. It was once there and you are trying to make it no more. You might say well i put it there easy, taking it away can't be that hard.

Well (and ryan I hope you are reading this) when is the last time you glued something? How easy was that to get on? How much of a pain was it to get off?

So just fat loss alone doesn't feel good, it shouldn't feel good, anyone that tells you it will either doesn't know, or doesn't want you to know. That doesn't mean fat loss isn't good for you if you are overweight. Just saying it isn't a walk in the park for the body.

This is why I try to get my client to lose fat as quick as they can, but as safely as they can. So that The Drain Effect doesn't turn into what we are going to talk about in part two.

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Leigh Peele-Fat Loss Blog

Symptons of Fat Loss Part 2 (Overtraining)

So in the last section (Fat Loss Effects Part 1) we talked about how even in the healthy part of fat loss you don't feel so sun shiny great. Now we are going to talk about what happens when you take this effect to another level or allow it to go on for to long.

Some clients have come to me having been in on a diet in one form or another for the majority of their life. They have had short bouts of breaks but for the most part life for them has been a never ending bulk and a cut cycle, now whether or not during the heavy eating they were lifting thats another story. Still though that feed and then don't feed pattern is ingrained into their natural habit and activity. Combine this with training and we receive a ticket to overtraining.



Now before I dive right in yes, most of the following problems
can occur by eating a low caloric diet for too long if you aren't training AND some of these problems can present themselves if you aren't taking good training rest even if your feeding is on point.

Good? Moving on.

If you don't feed your body well enough for an extended period of time what do you think is going to happen. What if you decided to drive your car with little to no oil day after day after day? Stuff would start wearing down wouldn't it, wouldn't be functioning right. The concept is really pretty simple people, drive hard, fuel hard.
CAN'T CHEAT THE BODY. Go ahead though, defy the law, here is what to look for if you do.

* Sudden inability to complete workouts
* Feeling unmotivated and lacking energy
* Increased susceptibility to colds, sore throats and other illnesses
* Loss in appetite
* Decrease in performance
* Insomnia
* Achiness or pain in the muscles and/or joints
* Fatigue
* Headaches
* Elevated morning pulse

In short you don't feel so hot and why should you, your running on empty over and over again. Did I mention how not good for fat loss this is?

So what is the best method to assure yourself that you are training for fat loss, but not burning yourself out? How do we gauge the middle ground that leads us to the ultimate goal we have?

OOOHH NEXT TIME

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(I will make sure to post up all three when done )

You can find more info like this at my blog

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Leigh Peele-Fat Loss Blog

a side from being moody over all I feel really good about myself and what I eat and I don't feel like if I am burnning out my body feels good there are some day that I am sore and but I haven't actually counted the actual calories that I am eating so thanks for the advice I didn't realize there is so much to losing weight