disclaimer: this is educational content, not medical advice. if you have a health condition, are pregnant, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to a doctor or registered dietitian before changing how you eat.
you finally stop skipping that afternoon snack because you’ve read (probably more than once, maybe even here) that women who lift need more food than they think. it’s a small change, nothing dramatic, and yet a few hours later something feels off. you feel heavier and a bit too full, slightly guilty in a way you can’t really explain. and a little voice starts asking if this is too much, if you’re going to gain fat, if you’re slowly losing control.
i know that feeling very well. for years i ate as little as i could get away with, and food was tangled up with a lot of things that had nothing to do with nutrition. eating more, for me, meant losing control, and losing control was the thing i was most afraid of. so even when i started reading about training and nutrition and understood, in theory, that my body needed more energy, my brain kept treating every extra portion like a mistake.
you can understand perfectly well that your body needs more fuel to build muscle, recover and feel good, and still find it really hard to put that food on your plate. it’s a very common place to be, and there are physical, mental and cultural reasons behind it. but once you can see them clearly, they get a lot easier to work with.
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your “normal” might not be what your body needs
when we think about how much food we need, most of us picture a number we read somewhere years ago, or simply the amount we’ve been eating for so long that it feels normal. the problem is that your body doesn’t care what feels normal to you. it cares about what you’re asking it to do. if you train 3-4 times a week and you’re fairly active the rest of the day, you need a lot more calories than most of us assume, and a lot more than the 1,200 kcal that diet culture has been selling as “normal” for women for decades.
there’s another layer to it. when you’ve been eating too little for a long time, that amount slowly becomes your reference point. it’s what a normal plate looks like to you, so anything bigger looks excessive, even when it’s exactly what you need. and you can’t always count on hunger to correct you.
after long periods of restriction or very rigid eating, hunger signals can get muted or confusing, so the fact that you’re not starving doesn’t prove you’re eating enough.
i trained for years without seeing real results, and for a long time i couldn’t understand why. i was showing up and working hard, but i had no energy during my sessions and my body wasn’t changing, no matter how much effort i put in. my conclusion back then was that i must still be eating too much, so i ate even less, which of course made everything worse. i was stuck in a loop where the solution i kept choosing was the exact thing causing the problem.
breaking free from the “eat less” mentality didn’t happen overnight. it came from making small, daily choices to trust the process, fuel my body properly, and understand that eating more doesn’t automatically mean gaining more fat.
today, i eat more than i ever have, plenty of carbs included, and i’m stronger and leaner than i was at 25.
the rules you didn’t know you were following
even when you understand all of this, eating more can feel like breaking a rule. most of the time you actually are breaking one, just not a rule you’d ever say out loud.
think about the ones that float around in fitness and diet culture: never take a second serving, earn your meal with a workout, no carbs in the evening, stay under a certain number of calories, eat as little as you can without being hungry. most of us picked up a few of these years ago, from magazines, from our families, from friends, from instagram, and even if we don’t consciously believe them anymore, they keep running in the background. so when you add a snack or eat a bigger dinner on a rest day, you cross a line your brain still remembers, and the anxiety or guilt shows up even if the decision makes complete sense.
part of the problem is that food was never just food for most of us. somewhere along the way, eating less got linked to being disciplined, being in control, being “good”, while eating more got linked to weakness, weight gain and failure. so the discomfort you feel after that extra portion has much more to do with what it means to you than with the food itself. a food decision can be completely reasonable from a nutrition point of view and still feel bad emotionally, and both of those things can be true at the same time.
for some of us it goes even deeper, because eating little becomes part of who we are. you’re the one who always eats “reasonably”, who never snacks, who skips dessert, who makes up for a big dinner with a longer run the next morning. people may even have complimented you for it. letting go of that can feel like losing a quality you’ve been proud of for years, and like putting at risk the results you worked so hard for.
your body needs time to adjust too
not everything is in your head, though. eating more can be physically uncomfortable as well, especially if you increase your intake quickly or start eating a lot more volume than you’re used to.
you’ll probably feel fuller after meals for a while, and you might notice some bloating or changes in your digestion as your gut gets used to more food and more fiber. the scale will also move, and for most of us this is the scariest part. when you eat more, especially more carbs, your muscles store more glycogen (the form your body uses to store carbs), and every gram of glycogen is stored with roughly three grams of water. add the extra food sitting in your digestive system at any given moment, and it’s completely normal to see the number go up by a kilo or so in the first couple of weeks without having gained anything close to that in fat.
i felt all of this very clearly during my bulk last year. by the end i was eating close to 3,000 kcal a day, and it wasn’t only a mental challenge. i was bloated a lot of the time, and most of my clothes felt tight. there’s one important difference, though: a bulk is a planned phase where you eat more than your body needs, on purpose, to build muscle. eating enough means eating what your body actually uses, and for most women that’s a much gentler change, usually a few hundred calories spread across the day.
something that helped me a lot was learning to separate physical fullness from the anxiety of having eaten more. they can feel very similar, that heavy and uneasy feeling after a meal, but one comes from your stomach doing its job and the other from your brain reacting to a broken rule. asking myself which one i was feeling didn’t make it disappear, but it stopped me from treating every full stomach as proof that i’d overdone it.
your digestion will usually settle as your habits change, but don’t blame everything on the adjustment period. if the symptoms are strong or don’t get better after a few weeks, talk to your doctor.
how to make eating enough feel less uncomfortable
these are the things that helped me, and the ones i’d suggest to a friend who’s in the same place.
❤️🩹 stop trying to earn your food. your meals aren’t a reward for training, and a long run isn’t a way to pay for last night’s dinner. you need to eat on rest days too, because that’s when a lot of the repair happens. if you catch yourself planning extra cardio after a bigger meal, that’s the habit worth working on first.
🥬 add before you change anything else. you don’t need to rebuild your whole diet. start with one thing, like a real snack in the afternoon, a bigger portion of rice at lunch, a drizzle of olive oil or a handful of nuts on your salad, or a slice of bread with your eggs. keep it for a week or two until it feels normal, then add the next thing. small additions are much easier on your head and your digestion than a sudden jump.
🍒 build meals around more than protein. protein matters, and i’ll never tell you otherwise, but a plate of chicken and broccoli isn’t a complete meal for someone who trains — or anyone else. carbs fuel your sessions and refill your glycogen, fats play a role in hormone production, and fiber keeps your digestion working well. you don’t need every meal to be perfect, only more complete than it used to be.
📝 keep some structure. eating enough doesn’t mean throwing away everything you know and eating at random. you can still plan your meals, track your intake for a while if it helps you see what’s really going on, follow your progress in the gym and have nutrition goals. what changes is that food stops being a daily test of willpower and becomes something you organize so it supports what you’re doing.
🔋 look beyond the scale. your weight will move around, especially at the beginning, and your body might feel different for a few weeks. so pay attention to other signs too: your energy, your strength, how you recover between sessions, how you sleep and how much space food takes in your head.
💝 get help if it feels too heavy. if eating more brings up a lot of distress, or if you keep going back and forth between restricting and compensating, you don’t have to figure it out alone. a dietitian who specializes in eating disorders, or another qualified professional, can help you work through it safely.
eating enough is something you learn
you don’t have to turn eating into a new project with a new set of rules to follow perfectly. what you’re learning, little by little, is to give your body what it needs, even when that goes against everything you’ve always considered normal.
and if this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.
thanks for reading,
—glicia ⋆˖⏾*⋆.
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about the writer
i’m glicia, a certified personal trainer and dietitian in training based in paris. at never not hungry i translate research and complex concepts into clear, relatable insights you can actually use in your everyday life. when i’m not writing, i’m designing workout programs, trying overpriced cafés, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.
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i help women get stronger, feel more confident, and build a better relationship with training. if you’ve been thinking about coaching, tell me where you are, where you want to go, and what you feel stuck on right now. we’ll figure out together whether coaching could be the right next step for you.
selected references
2023 International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) consensus statement on relative energy deficiency in sport (REDs), Mountjoy et al., BJSM, 2023
Metabolic adaptation to weight loss: implications for the athlete, Trexler, Smith-Ryan & Norton, Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, 2014
Reduced resting skeletal muscle protein synthesis is rescued by resistance exercise and protein ingestion following short-term energy deficit, Areta et al., American Journal of Physiology: Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2014
The availability of water associated with glycogen during dehydration: a reservoir or raindrop?, King, Jones & O’Hara, European Journal of Applied Physiology, 2018
Help, not harm: psychological foundation for a nondieting approach toward health, Mcfarlane, Polivy & Mccabe, Journal of Social Issues, 1999