Underfed and Overtrained: Why Eating More Can Be What Finally Works

By Tina Chagoury, Clinical Dietitian · 7 min read · 2026-08-21

If you eat very little, train hard, and your weight will not move, you are not failing. You may be in the exact state that prevents change.

There are women who still believe that if they are not hungry, they are not losing.

I want to talk about that, because it is one of the most damaging ideas in women's health, and I see the consequences of it every week.

The most common thing I hear before someone starts

When I give a woman her protocol, whether in clinic or inside my programme, one of the most frequent responses I get before she has even begun is: this is far too much food. I will gain weight. I already eat barely half of what you have given me.

And here is the thing. She arrived at my clinic because her weight was not moving. She has been trying to lose for a long time. She has excess body fat. And she is eating half of what I have prescribed.

That is not a coincidence. That is the mechanism.

Underfed and overtrained

There is something close to an epidemic among women right now: eating less than they need and training harder than they should. Underfed and overtrained.

Now stack the rest of life on top. Work. Children. Waking at five. Perhaps an existing health problem. Perhaps years of poor sleep.

What that combination produces is a woman in a constant state of nervous system dysregulation. Permanently in fight or flight.

And a body in that state does something entirely logical: it shuts down every function it considers non essential. Fat loss is non essential. Fertility is non essential. Ovulation is non essential. All available resources go toward getting through the day without collapsing.

That is what nervous system dysregulation actually means in practice.

What happens when women eat properly instead

Two weeks. That is often all it takes for the pattern to break.

The comment I hear most often afterwards is a version of: I could not believe it. I did not think I could eat this much and lose fat.

There is nothing magical happening. The sequence is simple and physiological:

1. She starts eating adequately, with enough protein and enough quality.

2. Her nervous system settles.

3. She is genuinely nourished for the first time in years.

4. She has energy to train properly, rather than dragging herself through it.

5. She has the capacity to do what she wants during the day without exhaustion.

6. Satiety returns, and with it the constant food noise stops.

You underestimate how much it matters to actually feel full.

A real case

A forty six year old woman came to me having gained four kilograms over a year with no explanation. Her bloodwork was excellent. Glucose, insulin, cholesterol, inflammatory markers, all normal. The single abnormal finding was a very low vitamin D.

Desperate, she had tried intermittent fasting for two months. Over those two months she gained a further two kilograms.

When we looked at her actual eating, the picture became clear. Even before the fasting, she had no time for breakfast, no time for lunch and no time for dinner. Many days she ate nothing until the evening and then ate one very large meal, usually with extra carbohydrate or something sweet, because by then the cravings were overwhelming.

What we changed over four weeks:

• Vitamin D3 with K2, taken with the main meal to improve absorption
• Stopped the intermittent fasting entirely
• Three meals, no snacks: a substantial protein rich breakfast, a substantial protein rich lunch with carbohydrate, and a protein rich dinner
• Bone broth daily

In four weeks she lost a little under two kilograms of fat. She did not lose a single gram of muscle. She gained perhaps two hundred grams of it.

And what she said to me mattered more than the numbers: I did not realise I was not eating. I felt like I was overdoing it, but technically I was not eating at all.

Why this happens to so many women

I cannot count the number of times a woman has told me she thought she was doing well, thought she was eating well, thought her portions were fine, and it turned out she was doing almost everything wrong. That is not stupidity. It is the result of decades of contradictory information, from childhood right through to menopause.

In perimenopause it is normal for weight to come off more slowly and go on more easily. The correct response at that stage is not more restriction and harsher training. It is to make the body feel safe, and to feed it.

Often we need to eat more than we currently are in order to find the solution, not less. And we should not be adding punishing exercise or random interventions that increase the stress load further.

This article is nutrition education, not medical advice.

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About the author. Tina Chagoury is a licensed clinical dietitian with over twenty years of practice, specialising in women's hormonal health and metabolism. She is the creator of the Hormone Reset Method™, a structured six month programme designed to work with your physiology rather than against it. Learn more about the Hormone Reset Method.