Dan here today. Do you ever have one of those weeks where you just don’t seem to have any energy? That has been this week for me. I slept 10 hours on Monday night and 9 hours the past three nights, yet I still feel tired. I typically do three hard workouts a week (plus a bunch of easier ones) with no problem, yet when I tried to do my first workout of the week on Wednesday, I made it less than 5 minutes before I gave up and collapsed, exhausted, on the ground. I tried again yesterday and made it 7 minutes before the same thing happened, and today it was about the same. There are a number of possible explanations for this - a series of 4 am wakeup calls last week, readjusting to Mountain time after spending a couple of days on the East Coast, a race I did on Sunday – but the more I think about it, the main reason seems to be that I haven’t been eating enough.
For some reason, when my body needs food, it seems to get tired before it gets hungry. I also never really get uncomfortably full unless I really, really try. This means that I can’t pay attention to normal cues about when to eat and not to eat, so I try to track all of my food on Spark People. I’ve been looking over my log for the past week, and sure enough, I’ve been below where I should be almost every day. I thought I had learned this lesson already, and I think I’ve even blogged about it here before somewhere. Still, it looks like I need a refresher that when I’m tired it means I need to eat. I should probably go have a sandwich.
Anyone else feel like they can’t really trust the signals their body is sending them when it comes to food?