How Eating More Helped This 40-Year-Old Fitness Blogger Get In Shape

Nessa Sphere has grown a huge Instagram following from sharing the ups and downs of her health and fitness journey. Over the last three years the German-native has transformed her eating and exercise habits to trim down and tone up, losing five centimetres from her waist and putting on three kilograms of muscle.

And the best part? She actually ate more to achieve her incredible results.

Let's talk food and calories ??? I get lots of questions about how much you should eat. It is not easy to answer this question. It depends on a lot of things: your weight, your height, your age, how active you are during the day, how often and how intensive you workouts are and what your goal is. But one is definitely easy to estimate. It's how much you shouldn't eat. You can't starve yourself ‼️ When I see people saying that they eat 800-1200 kcal, this seriously scares me. You won't get any results on a long run with this amount of calories. Your body and you need enough fuel to feel good, to take challenges and to achieve goals. Let's start the calculations with RMR (Resting Metabolic Rate), basically the amount of calories you burn when at rest (or in different words – you need to stay alive). The more active you are during a day, the more calories you should eat to maintain your weight. It is normal that when you want to lose fat you decrease your calories intake. However, you should be smart doing that. Don't put your body in a high calorie deficit straight from the beginning of the process. You will not have much to cut later on when you hit a plateau and you don't see any progress anymore. I would suggest starting at 10% of your calorie intake caloric decrease per day for a few weeks. If you look at my progress on the pictures, it happened mostly because I changed my eating habits (and started to workout out). In 2015 my eating was a total mess. There were days I forgot about food (too much work and stress) or I could eat the whole box of donuts only for lunch. When I switched to linear calories intake per day my results rushed. And the consistency and regular eating was the key. If you are now at a very low calorie intake and you don't see progress, try to eat more. It may be a little bit difficult at the beginning, you may gain weight but when your body adjust to it, you will see only benefits ??♥️? #transformationtuesday #transformation #lifting #heavyweights #girlswholift #beforeandafter #ageisjustanumber #nutrition #eatbetternotless #bbgprogress #screwthescale

A post shared by Nessa (@nessasphere) on Jun 14, 2017 at 12:09pm PDT

In a recent Instagram post, the 40-year-old busted some huge misconceptions many people have about nutrition and weight loss.

“Food is your friend not your enemy,” she captioned her impressive before and after image.

“I believe that if there is anything that people completely overlook, it is the nutrition aspect of living a healthy lifestyle. Most of us, when it comes to eating healthy, think about a bowl of salad with grilled chicken.”

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“But is it enough to reach your goals? Definitely not. Unknown to most people, one of the biggest reasons they don’t get results they aim for, is simply NOT eating enough. When people start their fitness journey, they add a lot of cardio to their daily routine and cut calories way too low to get results faster. But that is actually working against them.”

Nessa previously told Self that after starting a demanding job, she let her healthy habits slip. She started doing Kayla Itsines’ BBG program but her progress plateaued after several months. Nessa says she really started to see results when her food routine changed, involving consistent meal prep, five to size well balanced meals each day, and a caloric intake of 2000-2200.

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“I turned on my metabolism, I constantly progress, I look leaner although I gained weight, I am stronger and I feel great,” she wrote on Instagram.

“Building muscle, weight lose or body recomposition is a patience game. It takes time and consistency to make it work. Don’t skip meals, make food your friend not your enemy and remember, eating more is the key to losing more and looking better.”

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