Makes total sense - thanks 
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@ediblehedge, your situation came to mind while reading this article about RED-S (relative energy deficiency in sports).
"So when you are in a state of low energy availability, you can start to become preoccupied with food and training, and that becomes the focus of your day. You might enter into this state completely unintentionally, but all of a sudden it sort of becomes an obsession.
The physical symptoms to be looking out for are low energy, low moods, any indication that the essential (or I guess youād call them non-essential) bodily systems arenāt functioning properly, because all of your energy is being directed towards the activity. For women, the main big red flag would be a missing menstrual cycle or an irregular menstrual cycle. For a man that might look like low libido, loss of morning erections, which is not something guys like talking about, but probably a lot of them experience. A poor response to training, poor response to overcoming an injury, and [more frequent] illness and injury is a big warning sign because youāre not recovering properly."
This symptom resonated with me:
āFrom from my point of view I always seem to find myself with a bad knee, or a bad hip, or a bad ankle, or just little kind of niggles fairly regularly, but theyāre always easily attributable to something else. It was never āam I eating enough?ā. Itās āam I doing too much?āā
And this point, which I have recently found to be true for me as Iāve allowed my baseline weight to increase slightly (1.2kg):
"If youāre trying to get lighter to improve your power-to-weight ratio it feels like [youāre] doing the right thing, even though youāre not necessarily doing the right thingā¦
As a case study, I would always be chasing sort of the set average speed, and I kind of got to a plateau and it couldnāt seem to get any faster, no matter how much I restricted my intake, or increased my volume of training load; I just couldnāt get past it. Now Iāve started deliberately eating more I could quite easily go beyond that plateau having done far less training"
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Thanks so much for this Sir @RitzMan!
This article totally resonated with me, more so than all other reading Iāve done around RED-S.
Whilst Iām fairly sure I drove (cycled perhaps) myself to RED-S some years back, I had never cross referenced my training logs, food logs and daily journal. Just now looked back to when my weight hit a low of 60kg (Iām 178 cm) in 2018 and remembering a friend kindly telling me how awful I looked. Itās pretty clear my training and diet had both my physical and mental state in a very bad place.
Took a lot of work to get my weight back up to 72kg, but it wasnāt easy going and did bounce around from 60-65 for a long time.
Whilst I know I feel I might still be missing out on eating enough, I do know this is driven by maths and not intuition.
I did totally overhaul my diet last summer and started eating eggs and full fat diary after 17 years vegetarian and the last 8.5 of these vegan (all whole foods and no processed junk). Restarted eating fish and meat late last year. In that time Iāve got off thyroid meds completely and halved my TRT meds without detriment to how I feel or my blood test results.
I know that Iām in a far better place now. However, I know thereās still a mental struggle going on that I need to work on. Hopefully Iāll get there soon and be able to eat intuitively and stop tracking.
Will definitely try eating something before harder training sessions and keeping experimenting a monitoring how I feel.
Thanks again, really appreciate it. This has been super helpful.
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Sir @ediblehedge, Iām so glad the article helped. Donāt underestimate the significance of this quote. It sounds like you got your endocrine system back in balance, which has positive rippling effects throughout your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies. For most people, that change could be captured by them saying āI feel much better and strongerā.
These days, the Norwegians dominate the world of triathlon by using a hyper data-driven approach. They are having a massive impact on how athletes measure, interpret and adapt their training. Kristian Blummenfelt and Gustav Iden are international celebrities for their dominating performance and sweep of the 2023 World Triathlon Series.
And yet, as data obsessed as their coach Olav Aleksander Bu is, he said in a recent interview that he will always prioritise how the athlete feels over what the data tells him. He said the data will never fully capture what the athlete is capable of, only the athlete themself can know that. (cue Wahooās Mental Toughness Program)
So having climbed to the highest peak of data analysis, Olav sees that RPE (feeling), the benchmark athletes used for millennia to measure their performance prior to the introduction of digital devices and laboratory testing, is still the most accurate indicator. Interestingly, he has confirmed for his elite athletes that their RPE consistently correlates with his own data-driven projections.
Like you, Iām also very data driven. But after hearing Olavās perspective, I defer to my inner sense when in doubt about how to proceed in my training and diet. Adding the aforementioned 1.2kg to my frame is an example. Even as my body systems are enjoying the extra nutrition, my mind still rattles on about taking it off so I am at my target weight. Such is the dance we do with our minds and emotions. In the world of meditation itās called the āmonkey mindā for good reason!
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I just stumbled upon this older forum thread which speaks to the importance of consistently collecting and analysing data while allowing RPE to have the final say. Gym and Yoga TSS values - #19 by SirAlexanderLee
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Great thread - thanks for that. Makes total sense that ultimately itās down to intuition, although Iām pretty sure my intuition module is faulty
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Donāt underestimate the significance of this quote. It sounds like you got your endocrine system back in balance, which has positive rippling effects throughout your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual bodies.
Couldnāt agree more! This is by far my biggest training success to date. Being rather simple, it took far too long to learn.
In comparison, a Knighthood quest is āeasyā 
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