Signs You’re Not Eating Enough

Regardless of whether this is a result of pressure, ailment, craze counting calories, an awful mishap or busy schedule, for some individuals it can be anything but difficult to skip suppers and undereat. What's more, much the same as overeating, undereating negatively affects our physical and psychological well-being.

Aside from the obvious symptom of weight loss, there are many signs indicating you're not eating enough. 

Your Blood Sugar very high

While many people blame excessive carbohydrate consumption for wild blood sugar swings, you might be surprised to learn that inadequate calorie consumption can cause just as many issues with blood sugar control. The most common issue that comes from chronic under-eating is hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar.

Hypoglycemia is defined as blood sugar below 70 mg/dL, though some people experience symptoms at higher blood sugar levels. Common symptoms include hunger, shakiness, anxiety, dizziness, sweating, weakness, confusion, and changes in mood.

Under-eating can easily cause hypoglycemia, especially when combined with exercise. And because many people feel better eating sugary foods when they’re hypoglycemic, this can lead to the common cycle of high and low blood sugar swings that cause chronic dieters to overeat or binge on junk foods.

This is yet another reason that the most sustainable diet for weight loss provides adequate calories to keep your hormones and blood sugar even-keeled.

You feel sluggish and weak

Your muscles store carbohydrates inside for fuel as something called glycogen—this fuel is used by your fast-twitch muscle fibers in high-performance situations like picking up something really heavy or sprinting. When you aren’t eating enough, your body can eat through your glycogen stores, which robs your muscle of this high-performance fuel.

Robbed of calories and forced into a “starvation mode,” your body will also start to eat away at muscle for energy rather than attacking your fat stores, that’s why people on extremely low-calorie diets often lose 30 percent of their weight as muscle, and why starvation dieters often look “skinny fat” rather than healthy and slim.

The compound effect is that you’ll feel tired and weak if you’re not eating enough. And don’t think you can just sleep it off: One side effect reported from extremely low-calorie diets is a difficulty falling and staying asleep, a symptom experts associate with uneven blood sugar levels.

Your mood is totally unpredictable

Have you ever heard the term “hangry” before?

This urban slang refers to the state of anger and irritability resulting from being hungry. And even though it’s a made up term, there’s actually scientific evidence for the existence of this volatile emotional state caused by inadequate food intake. 

Not eating enough food can lead to hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar. Since the brain requires blood sugar to function optimally, when it starts to drop, one of the first cognitive processes that suffers is self-control. And your ability to exert self control allows you to control your attention, regulate your emotions, cope with stress, resist impulsivly, and refrain from aggressive behavior.

So if you’re always on a short fuse, or your mood is constantly swinging between cheerful and irritable or anxious, you should make sure that you’re not severely under-eating before making any other significant changes to your diet and supplement or medication routine.

You Can’t Fall Asleep (Or Stay Asleep)

Insomnia and other sleep disturbances are one of the top health complaints. Oddly enough, one of the first symptoms that changes when eating a more calorically appropriate diet is a significant improvement in sleep duration and quality. Even if you weren’t necessarily waking up hungry, you will find that an increased calorie intake (especially from carbohydrates) can lead them to fall asleep faster and stop waking up at night.

One reason for this likely comes from the improved blood sugar control that arises from an appropriate calorie and carbohydrate intake. As your blood sugar drops overnight, your liver must release its stored glucose (in the form of glycogen) to keep your blood sugar steady.

If you’re constantly under-eating, and especially if you’re overexercising on top of that, your liver won’t have the glycogen stores it needs to keep your blood sugar stable, and your body must release stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to promote gluconeogenesis, the process of creating new glucose. If these stress hormones elevate high enough, they can actually wake you up in the middle of the night.

Making sure you’re eating enough overall and including a carb and fat-dense bedtime snack 1-2 hours before going to sleep can help keep your blood sugar stable overnight, leading to more restful, uninterrupted sleep.

Your weight loss has stalled

Weight loss plateaus, where you’ve lost weight, and now can’t seem to anymore, can come from lots of different things: After a bit of success with strict tracking and portion control, some dieters start to get comfortable (and a little lazy) about their plan. Others forget to adjust their food intake down to match their new weight, so they’re still eating at a weight loss level for their starting weight, which isn’t as big a deficit for their current weight.

But some just aren’t eating enough. This messes with your hunger hormones and thyroid hormones which can contribute to the metabolism slowdown. Consuming a meal that’s slightly higher in carbs and calories can have an effect on your hormones all week: It raise your levels of leptin, a hormone associated with fullness, and lower levels of ghrelin, a hormone associated with hunger. It can also re-balance the thyroid hormones that can contribute to slowing your metabolism.

Your skin’s dry, flaky or itchy

This one has to do with fat calories: The fatty oils in your diet not only make skin-helping Vitamins like A, D, and E more bio-available, but the fat itself can improve the health of your skin.

And multiple studies have shown that eating the right fats, “healthy” fats like those found in olive oil, can help your body lose weight, specifically around your belly. Dieters in Germany were given yogurt with olive oil added in as a supplement to their normal diet. Even though this yogurt was added as extra calories, the dieters did not gain weight or body fat, and they had more feelings of fullness than those who ate the yogurt without the oil.
You’re having abnormal diarrhea or constipation.


When your body slows down to conserve energy, because you’re not eating enough, your digestive system can also slow down. Your intestinal lining can become damaged or less effective in this case, meaning that the food you do eat doesn’t get digested correctly. Not only does this cause a deficiency in how many nutrients are absorbed by the body, but it can also cause diarrhea or constipation. And that just makes things worse: When you have diarrhea, your body is depleted of vitamins and minerals.