Do you eat clean yet still feel completely exhausted? Here’s why
Photo by August de Richelieu
Why do I feel tired even though I eat clean?
Have you ever typed that into Google, standing at your kitchen sink in your robe, giant cup of coffee in hand? If so, you, like many others, are on the hunt for more energy. Less afternoon crashes. A decent night of sleep. Gas-less digestion.
But what if eating clean is part of the problem?
Let me introduce you to Tori.
Tori was 40 and EXHAUSTED. Overwhelmed by the constant stream of contradictory health information, she did what a lot of well-intentioned folks do; she tried to eat as “clean” as possible. For years.
Green smoothies, roasted veggies, heaps of quinoa, rice and beans, sweet potatoes, chickpeas. These were the makings of a typical day of food in her world. She’d cut out red meat and ate little to no chicken, fish, or dairy, with only the solitary egg here and there. On its face her choices look great, but she was woefully missing the mark.
This was Tori’s story before she learned how to eat and live for optimal metabolic health. A story shared by countless people who ate clean, but in doing so created a whole set of health problems.
In this article, my aim is to teach you why the inputs of “clean eating” don’t always produce the outcomes you expect, how that mismatch leads to exhaustion, and what to do about it.
How Clean Eating Accidentally Turns Into Chronic Undereating
Chronic undereating is one of the most commonly overlooked parts of eating clean. Your body interprets it as a threat to survival, thus it treats it as a stressor.
Take for example this day of meals:
Breakfast
1 bowl of oatmeal
Small handful berries
Small handful nuts
Coffee with cream + sugar
Rough tally:
Calories: ~350
Protein: ~12-15g
Carbs: ~30–35g
Fat: ~18–20g
Lunch
Mixed greens salad
~3 oz grilled chicken
Some veggies
1–2 tbsp dressing
Rough tally:
Calories: ~350–400
Protein: ~20–25g
Carbs: ~15–20g
Fat: ~18–22g
Afternoon energy bump
12oz. Coffee number 2 with cream + sugar
Rough tally:
Calories: ~80–100
Protein: ~0g
Carbs: ~8–10g
Fat: ~4–5g
Dinner
4 oz salmon or chicken
½ cup rice or potatoes
Roasted veggies
Olive oil drizzle
Rough tally:
Calories: ~450–500
Protein: ~28-32g
Carbs: ~30–35g
Fat: ~18–22g
Day estimated intake:
Calories: ~1,250–1,350
Protein: ~60–75g
Carbs: ~120–140g
Fat: ~60–65g
At first glance there appears to be nothing wrong with this day of meals, except that the person eating it is WAY underfed.
For context, 1,300 calories just meets the fuel needs of a 3 year old toddler. For an adult woman it’s barely enough to maintain basic metabolic functions like converting food into fuel or filtering waste through the kidneys. Much more energy is needed in order to do things like produce hormones, handle stress, and think clearly.
When you consistently don’t eat enough, you create low energy availability, where the body doesn’t have the resources to fuel the demands of your job or life (and maybe your kids, and definitely your husband!).
Chronically undereating will leave you feeling tired, easily irritated, and ready to flip a table. This state is no bueno for 99% of things you do in a day, which is why building in adequate food intake is one of the first priorities I address with clients. As much as calories have been demonized over the decades, calories are necessary to power your life.
In my practice I love data. Data helps us make changes with accuracy and efficiency. If you don’t know how much energy is coming in, you’re guessing, and guessing is a terrible strategy.
So, track what you eat for three days.
But don’t change anything about how you eat. No “being good.” Just collect the data.
Log your meals in an app like Cronometer or on paper and look at total daily calories, not just food quality. Most people are shocked by how little they’re actually eating.
Once you have the numbers, pick one meal per day and intentionally eat 100-300 calories more at that meal.
The Blood Sugar Rollercoaster
Another explanation behind why you feel exhausted despite eating clean is out of uncontrolled blood sugar.
If we go back to the breakfast example of someone who chronically undereats, when the day starts with a carb-dominant option like oatmeal or a pastry — or let’s be honest, just a cup of coffee — it sets off the blood sugar rollercoaster.
Blood sugar is usually already low after fasting all night. To get you up and running the body compensates by increasing cortisol and adrenaline, which temporarily raise blood sugar so you can function, then insulin is sent out to bring it back down.
The problem is that insulin often overshoots the mark. Instead of returning blood sugar to a stable baseline, it dips below the baseline. That dip is what triggers the late-morning/early-afternoon crash of brain fog, irritability, and needing a nap that’s nursed by a bar of chocolate.
So you do what most high-functioning adults do — you fix it with another cup of coffee or an energy drink. It bumps blood sugar back up temporarily, insulin responds again, and the cycle continues.
What can you do about it?
Start with another simple step: “dress your carbs”.
When you sit down to have that bowl of oatmeal, pair it with a protein and a fat. Think about it; the foundation of every outfit is your bra and panties, correct? You wouldn't leave home without them. Think of protein and fat as the bra and panties of your plate. Your carbs do not get to run around naked when you want to control blood sugar. Clothe them.
Undereating Protein
One of the many interpretations of clean eating is taking a plant-based approach to nutrition, where animal protein is often restricted or completely eliminated. This particular ideology of clean eating often positions protein as an optional nice-to-have instead of a foundational need-to-have.
Plant-based eating forces you into consuming carb-heavy meals, perpetuating the metabolic mismatch you just learned with blood sugar.
This is a problem because eating adequate protein is essential for so many functions, including:
providing energy
maintaining muscle
regulating metabolism
supporting hormone production
Immunity
Let’s zoom in on the muscle piece for a moment. When protein intake is too low, your ability to grow and maintain muscle comes to a halt. Having low muscle mass means you have a smaller “glucose sink” to soak up the carbs and turn them into usable energy, forcing your body to deploy more and more insulin to bring your blood sugar back into a reasonable range.
If nothing else, please let this be the reason you stop taking your muscles for granted.
So what do you do to address low protein?
If you eat no animal protein, start by adding that back into your diet. Make your aim be to decrease your carb load by crowding it out with protein. Build yourself up to eating 30g of animal-based protein at each meal, and all of the issues we’ve discussed thus far will take care of themselves.
Note: Plant protein and animal protein are not the same. Animal protein is superior for the human body due to its complete amino acid profile, high digestibility (or bioavailability), high nutrient density, and because you don’t have to consume a massive amount of it to get what your body needs compared to plants.
Depleted Minerals
Finally we have minerals. Minerals are critical to how you feel because they’re what allow your metabolism to work properly. And just like essential amino acids we cannot make them within our body, we have to get them from our food.
Imagine that — energy, focus, hormone production, thyroid function, digestion, and so many other functions begin and end at the mineral level. Honestly we all should’ve learned this in high school health and P.E. class.
What depletes your minerals?
Assuming you’re someone who already doesn’t consume much processed food, these are the other usual suspects that drain your mineral reserves:
STRESS.
Nutrient depleted soil that our food grows in.
Restrictive diets like vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, keto.
An active and athletic lifestyle.
So if you’re always exhausted, having digestive issues, struggle to focus, get sick often or stay sick for long periods — these are all blaring alarms that something is off at the mineral level.
And yes, this is true even if your bloodwork looks normal.
The solution to this is not to pull up Amazon and add a multi-vitamin and some magnesium to the cart. Blindly taking supplements simply because they sound like a good idea when you don’t know your mineral baseline is asking for trouble.
Minerals work in push-and-pull relationships with one another. Taking minerals without understanding your current mineral status could push you further into depletion, making your exhaustion worse. Or, your body could not need it at all and dump it, wasting your money while solving zero problems.
The solution:
Get a hair tissue mineral analysis. As I explained in this article, HTMA shows you the root cause of your specific mineral imbalances in a way that a blood test can’t, and gives you a fully personalized plan to resolve the problems without the heavy dependency on prescription meds.
The Takeaway
In all, I hope you see my goal isn’t to make clean eating out to be the villain, but clean eating without a metabolism-based strategy is incomplete. Being “healthy” today most intensely focuses on food quality, but the body doesn’t respond to quality alone.
You can eat healthy and still:
Be underfed
completely miss the protein mark
be depleted in key minerals that make everything work
ride the blood sugar rollercoaster
have very little muscle on your frame
Food quality alone doesn’t solve any of these problems, but it does ensure that exhaustion is a standard feature of your everyday life.
If you are someone who battles exhaustion, think of this as your invitation to refashion your nutrition so that your body can actually produce energy.
From now on when you’re preparing a meal ask yourself, Does this meal support my metabolism, my blood sugar, and my muscle?
True clean eating supports your metabolic health. Not the other way round. If you’re ready to stop feeling exhausted and start supporting your metabolism, you can begin with a Metabolism Health Audit, designed to help you see what’s actually going on in your body and map out your next best steps.
Have a question or a takeaway from what I’ve shared here?
Let’s chat in the comments.