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How to know if your body is not getting enough nutrients
Watch out for these 5 tell-tale signs
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Achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight can be a challenging task.
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This is especially true in our modern society where we lead a sedentary lifestyle and calorie dense food is constantly available, literally within arm’s length of desire.
When we restrict our food intake, our body slows down the metabolism to compensate for the loss of nutrients. This sadly is the worst possible way of losing weight.
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If your caloric intake is not adequate, you can end up with Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia. What’s worse is that an intentional food restriction to lose weight, or a significant decrease in appetite, due to any other disease or stress-related reasons can have serious health consequences.
Nutrition deficiency on a more or less regular basis can also lead to a number of physical, mental, and even emotional health issues.
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Below are 5 signs that your body is not getting enough nutrients:
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Your body is not getting enough nutrients: Tell-Tale Sign #1
Low energy levels
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Calories basically are units of energy that your body uses to function properly.
However, if you do not get sufficient calories, you are very likely to feel tired far more than usual all the time you are awake. A normal adult male has a requirement of around 2000 calories and an adult female 1700 calories per day.
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Any more and it gets stored as fat and you end up gaining excess weight. Any less and it will lead to weight loss. (Here hormonal and genetic tendencies also come to play and your metabolic rate will depend both on your food intake as well as these factors too).
During a crash dieting phase, a few people lower their daily caloric intake to fewer than even 1,000 calories per day. However, it will have a highly detrimental effect on your body.
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This is because you are not taking in the nutrition that is required to keep your body’s basic functions that are directly responsible for keeping you alive. Yes, you will almost certainly lose weight but at a terrible cost. That is the cost of your overall health.
There will eventually come a time when even the very lightest of physical activity such as taking the stairs or even simple walking can potentially cause fatigue. This is a classic and telltale sign that calorie intake is actually considerably below your real needs.
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Your body is not getting enough nutrients: Tell-Tale Sign #2
A noticeably pale complexion
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There are a fairly large number of different types of vitamin deficiencies that can also potentially lead to a loss of your skin’s own pigmentation. This, in turn, will result in a noticeably paler complexion than your usual normal one.
Getting the required nutrients can go a long way in restoring your body of all of these vitamins. This way you can regain your usual healthy looking skin.
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Your body is not getting enough nutrients: Tell-Tale Sign #3
Puffy-looking eyes
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If your eyes appear puffy (with dark circles under them) then the odds are that this just might be your skin’s way of trying to get your attention.
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Your body tells you that you are suffering from a nutritional deficit. In fact, you seriously lack iodine in the body.
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Your body is not getting enough nutrients: Tell-Tale Sign #4
Rapid hair loss
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Losing hair can turn out to be a singularly distressing state of affairs. After all few people like to see their hairlines retreat at lightning speeds. While it is certainly quite normal to lose the odd few strands of hair, on a more or less daily basis.
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But if you start noticing a marked increase in the amount of hair that is slowly but surely accumulating in either your hairbrush or for that matter your shower drain, then it just might be a major sign that you really are not eating as much as you should be. This is because there are a vast number of nutrients that are critically needed to maintain normal and healthy hair growth, all the year around.
Inadequate intake of calories can lead to the loss of vital nutrients such as iron, protein, biotin, and many other nutrients that are commonly associated with hair health.
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When you do not take in sufficient calories as well as key nutrients, then your body starts making a list of priorities. That is it effectively starts prioritizing the health of your critically important organs such as the brain, the heart, the kidneys over hair growth.
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Your body is not getting enough nutrients: Tell-Tale Sign #5
Constant hunger pangs
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When you do not eat enough food, you will feel hungry. This is practically an axiomatic assumption.
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And taking it to its logical conclusion, being hungry just about all the time is obviously one of the single most palpable signs that you are suffering from some form of nutritional deficiency.
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As a matter of fact, various studies conducted by the medical health service sector have now confirmed that both appetite and food cravings are the body’s direct response to a really drastic calorie restriction.
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In a nutshell, the less you eat, the more will it lead to changes in hormonal levels. Remember, your hormones are responsible to control hunger pangs as well as sugar levels.
There was actually a study stretching for three months that followed mice which had been fed a steady diet containing around about 40 percent fewer calories than their usual intake.
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As per the findings of this study their levels of the potent appetite-suppressing hormones leptin and IGF-1 had decreased and simultaneously their hunger signals had also increased quite significantly, as well.
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Conclusion
We can safely conclude that decreasing caloric intake beyond a certain level does more harm than good. Also, we should be very careful indeed with regard to our food choices.
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Use a calorie counting app introduced by a reliable telehealth company to make sure you are getting enough nutrients.
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Article by James Crook: James is a passionate blogger who loves to write on health and fitness related topics. Currently, he is a working as a blogger for a telemedicine app ‘Mend Family’. Follow @jamescrook911 for more updates.
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