Have you ever wondered why you're hitting a weight loss plateau despite doing all the right things?
We'll be peeling back the layers of the 'calories in versus calories out' equation and shedding light on why it's not as straightforward as it seems, particularly for women.
We'll also touch on why calorie counting isn’t the holy grail of weight management and how our weight can be influenced by more than just the food we consume.
We will also explore how your mental, emotional, and physical health habits can significantly enhance your overall wellbeing.
You'll also walk away with some insight as to why not all calories are created equal when it comes to calories in vs calories out; fitness trackers, nutrition labels and their accuracy.
Lastly, we talk about:
- different factors when it comes to weight loss such as gender, muscle mass, genetics, and even sleep deprivation.
- the potential psychological side effects of using tracking tools and learn to foster a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and your body without falling into a diet trap.
- determining the right amount of food for your body and goals, and establish healthier habits for sustainable weight loss.
So, hit play and get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about weight loss and metabolism.
Have you ever wondered why you're hitting a weight loss plateau despite doing all the right things?
We'll be peeling back the layers of the 'calories in versus calories out' equation and shedding light on why it's not as straightforward as it seems, particularly for women.
We'll also touch on why calorie counting isn’t the holy grail of weight management and how our weight can be influenced by more than just the food we consume.
We will also explore how your mental, emotional, and physical health habits can significantly enhance your overall wellbeing.
You'll also walk away with some insight as to why not all calories are created equal when it comes to calories in vs calories out; fitness trackers, nutrition labels and their accuracy.
Lastly, we talk about:
- different factors when it comes to weight loss such as gender, muscle mass, genetics, and even sleep deprivation.
- the potential psychological side effects of using tracking tools and learn to foster a healthy relationship with food, exercise, and your body without falling into a diet trap.
- determining the right amount of food for your body and goals, and establish healthier habits for sustainable weight loss.
So, hit play and get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about weight loss and metabolism.
Hey friend, welcome back to the Stronger Way to eat, move and live. Here we talk all things food freedom, fitness and life transformation, helping you heal your relationship to food, exercise your body and yourself. It is great to be back here with you today. I am so honored and so excited to bring you this episode. We are pulling this episode from the archive, but it is so applicable to my clients now, to so many of the listeners out there. If you have ever felt like you are doing all the things you've tried everything out there and no matter what you do or how hard you try, nothing seems to be working, then this is an episode for you. We dive into different parts of the metabolism and kind of what contributes to the calories out part of the calories in calories out equation. I give you some thoughts and some perspective when it comes to calorie tracking that maybe you've never considered before. If you have been following along for any period of time, then you know that. I believe that, yes, while calories in calories out can and does definitely play a part in your weight whether that's gaining weight, losing weight, maintaining weight there are definitely different factors at play. Especially as women, it is not always as easy. If you have ever gone on some sort of a weight loss journey or a fitness journey with your spouse or your husband and you notice that he is getting results, no problem. But yet you maybe are not losing weight, or maybe you're even seeing the scale go up and it feels like, or you guys are doing the same thing, you're doing the same workouts, you're following the same diet, the same nutrition plan, then this is definitely going to be an episode that you want to tune into. Without further ado, let's go ahead and get into that episode. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of the Strong Her Way to Eat, move and Live, where we talk all things food freedom, fitness and life transformation, ultimately helping you create a healthier relationship to food, fitness, your body and yourself. Today we are doing another client question and answer. I think so many of you will be able to relate to this. I know I sure could back in my deep dieting days. So for this client and many that I have worked with in the past, they really do feel like they are doing everything right and I'm using right in air quotes and still not necessarily seeing the results that they want.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes this is reflected in not seeing the scale budge or change. I shared a post last week on my Instagram and my Facebook that was pretty vulnerable, which really was about an experience that I had recently at the doctor's office where she wanted to get my weight. I'm seeing a new doctor and at first I declined and then she was pretty adamant about wanting it. She said that I could turn around. I didn't have to look at it, but I really did see that as an opportunity to see what came up for me mentally and emotionally, seeing the number on the scale. And it was really interesting, I have to say, to get on the scale, see a number that I wasn't expecting it was a number that was a little bit higher than I thought that it would be and then to see my mind go to work, to see kind of all of that old diet chatter come back up. So to me that was just an indication that there might still be some work for me to do around what I'm seeing on the scale and the number that I'm making it mean.
Speaker 1:But it's also an opportunity for me to really kind of look at, okay, my habits, my lifestyle. Are there some changes that I can make, that I want to make in order to ultimately, obviously, be in the healthiest body that I can be, even though all of my blood panel, all of my hormones, all of those things look pretty good. So, just as a reminder, you can get healthier, right. We can work on improving our health without necessarily seeing the scale move. We also don't necessarily know what the most ideal body weight is for our bodies, because the charts at the doctor's office are just that they're charts, right. It's based on these generalizations of populations, and so if you are feeling like the only way that you can get healthier is by losing weight, I want to encourage you to challenge that and perhaps you shelf this idea of having to lose weight and really do focus on mental health, emotional health and then physical health habits to improve your health, and then look at how can you measure your health in other ways, right? So maybe that's getting your hormones done, maybe that's getting a blood panel done. What are all of the different ways that you can measure your health? I know for me, one of the biggest ways that I know that I'm healthier is that I have a more regular healthy period. I don't obsess, I don't stress about food as much as I used to, about exercise, about calories. So those are also markers that I have actually gotten healthier, even if I'm not in a smaller body. That was a little bit of an aside or a tangent, but I think that it is so important anytime that we are talking about our weight or feeling like we have to lose weight.
Speaker 1:Sometimes that pressure that we put on ourselves really has us doing things that possibly aren't ultimately healthy for us, right? It really has us kind of pushing our bodies to the limits, especially when we oversimplify our weight to being calories and versus calories out. Now, of course, from a physics perspective, this makes sense, right? We cannot destroy mass, meaning that it has to shift, it has to go somewhere, right? So we have calories that come in versus the food that we eat. We have calories or energy that goes out and is burned, and if we can figure out how to navigate that balance, you know, theoretically we're going to be able to manipulate our weight. However, I know that that doesn't always seem like it's the case, right, it's like on paper, it looks like we're doing everything, right. Right, we're exercising, we're eating less, we're moving more and we're still not seeing those results that we want, and then that can end up leading us to feel frustrated, defeated or discouraged, usually because we feel like I can't eat any less and I can't exercise anymore. And for most of us that's absolutely right. Right, it already feels like we're eating too little. We're hungry all the time, we're exercising a ton, but yet the weight still won't budge.
Speaker 1:So here is the question this week from a client. She has been on her fitness journey for about two years now. She lifts, does cardio a couple times a week, watches her calorie intake and eats healthy for the most part. She has tried other things in the past, other programs in the past. She has some body dysmorphia, so meaning she's got some body image issues. Usually with body dysmorphia for women it's that we see ourselves in a larger body than we actually are. She thought that doing some of these other programs would have helped her because they take kind of the psychological approach to weight loss. But it hasn't. In fact the body obsession has gotten more, just the body image stuff has not resolved like she thought. On top of that, she's only eating 1200 calories a day, which is pretty low, I mean, for most of us. Our bodies are burning at least that or around that just to keep us alive, right, just with simple bodily functions. This particular client does some sort of activity, so she's working out some in some way, seven days a week, alternating between lifting, yoga, doing cardio and then weights. No doubt about it.
Speaker 1:When she first started working with me, she was feeling incredibly stuck right. It's that thought of I don't know what else I could do. I feel like I have done it all, I've tried it all and I'm still not seeing the scale move right, and it leads us to feeling like we are ultimately doing something wrong. So, like I said, on paper, the calories in versus calories out seems like it should be a slam dunk and would work 100% of the time. Right, it would work all of the time. But we know that that's not always the case. Right, we could be tracking our calories meticulously in an app the calories coming in, the calories coming out. You could also sub macros here. So this, I think, is a similar concept with the macros.
Speaker 1:But of course, we know that really, the only way to lose weight is to eat less than what we burn, right? So we have to get that sort of that negative energy and on paper, the equation looks good. However, even with those best intents, intentions and tracking, we find that it doesn't always seem to pencil out that way right. It's like I remember when I have first started my journey, feeling like, okay, if I could just, you know, eat this amount of calories this week, burn this amount of calories this week, then I should be on track for a one to two pound weight loss a week. Some, some weeks that would work, other weeks that wouldn't. And oftentimes I would get so frustrated and so upset with myself thinking what did I do wrong? You know, I tracked my food, I did my workouts and for some reason it still didn't work out quite the way that I thought that it was going to.
Speaker 1:But this calories in, calories out is really a growth over simplification, because there are so many different factors at play when it comes to our metabolism. Our metabolism is incredibly complex, but I'm going to give you just kind of this quick overview a super high level, very simple of how your metabolism works. So there are essentially four different areas that we can affect or manipulate for calories out, and one of them we actually don't really have a ton of control over that would be your BMR right. So your basal metabolic rate is just the amount of calories or the amount of energy that your body is going to use doing functions like breathing. So the respiration, heart beating that your brain is using, it's just the amount of energy that your body uses completely at rest.
Speaker 1:Then we have non exercise activity, so this could be things like fidgeting. It could be things like housekeeping, gardening. When I talk as I'm recording this podcast, I'm using my hands a lot, so something like that. Then we have exercise activity, so this is when we are doing some purposeful movement, so that could be a weight training session, yoga, swimming, biking, running, all of those kinds of things. And then we have the thermic effect of food, so this is the amount of energy used, or calories burned, in order for our bodies to process so the chewing of food and then the digestion of food.
Speaker 1:Now energy coming in by way of what we eat a day in a day can also have multiple factors that would impact the amount of energy that our body absorbs. So this could be our appetite, which is controlled by hormones and can be greatly impacted by a lack of sleep in major ways. So if you've ever had a poor night's sleep, you might find that the next day you feel a little bit hungrier than usual. Oftentimes it might even feel like no matter what you eat or how much you eat, you're not. You don't ever feel satisfied and a lot of times when we are sleep deprived, you might even notice that you're kind of gravitating towards those higher carb foods, higher sugar types of foods, because that's going to give you the quickest burst of energy.
Speaker 1:Our environment plays a huge role, right? So this could be the environment At your work. If there is a table that always has the cookies, the donuts, those kinds of things, that's oftentimes a lot easier to grab right. Or maybe you don't have access to a lot of healthy foods. We in the United States even have things called food deserts, where literally a convenience store might be the only quick access to food that somebody has. So that certainly is going to play a role in your food choices as well.
Speaker 1:Or the calories the types of calories that are coming in, the amount of calories that are actually absorbed by your body. So not every single calorie that we eat will be absorbed and or used for energy. For example, if you had a bag of chips or like a handful of chips, your body is going to be able to take in and absorb more of those calories than if you had a handful of almonds, because of the fiber content, because of what each of those different foods are made of. So just know that not all the calories coming in are going to be absorbed by your body and oftentimes the more processed the food is, the more of that energy our body is going to take, it's going to absorb, whereas the more of a whole food right, the less processed a food is, the harder our body has to work to pull the nutrients and because of the fiber content, you're actually not going to absorb quite the same amount of calories or energy.
Speaker 1:And then we have the satisfactory level of food right. So this is our sugar foods, our salt foods, our fat foods. Usually those have that really palatable feel, right, it kind of feels good in the mouth, it tastes really good, it hits all of those spots in our brains so that those kinds of foods, naturally we're going to want to probably eat more of those. And it's a lot harder for us to regulate how much we're consuming of foods like that, how much we're consuming of foods like that, because it kind of bypasses the area of our brain that is regulating the calories or the energy coming in. So it's so easy to overeat the chips, the cake, the cookies, because even though we're consuming, you know, maybe hundreds of calories at a time, our body doesn't actually register that. And then, of course, our psychology right, or the emotional and mental health so this could be your perceived control in your life or around food, stress, self-esteem, emotional regulation and mindset. So those are all factors that kind of impact the amount of energy or the calories that we take in.
Speaker 1:So we think if we can just balance the amount that we quote, unquote spend versus the amount that we have coming in, our weight would maintain, right? If we have kind of this zero sum balance, where the amount that we're consuming, the amount that we're burning is the same, then theoretically our weight should stay the same. If we are spending more than we're bringing in, then we would be in that deficit and we should lose. And then, of course, if we're bringing in more than we spend, our weight would go up. But our metabolisms are super diverse, just like we are as people. We're each uniquely and wonderfully made and our metabolisms are no different. This is one of the reasons that you could have two people eating and exercising the exact same way and each person's body is going to respond differently to that. So one of the reasons that I have a really hard time with us looking at you know so-and-so's body right and thinking, okay, if I just followed her workout program, if I just followed her diet or her nutrition plan, then my body is going to look like hers. I think sometimes that just sets us up for this disappointment and this failure, because our body is not necessarily the same as hers and is going to respond differently to that same stimulus.
Speaker 1:So there are a couple important things for us to note about BMR calculators, calorie calculators and trackers, nutrition labels and even fitness trackers. They aren't all super accurate. Some of them can have margins of error of up to 30% or more. So that's quite a bit right. That's saying if you thought that you were eating 100 calories of something or burning 100 calories, it could be as low as 70 or as high as 130. That, you know, slowly does kind of add up one way or the other. So if you're using a tracker of some sort, I'm not going to tell you not to do that, but I would just caution about using that in sort of this absolute truth. Just use it sort of understanding that there could be some sort of a margin of error there, right? This means that even if you are tracking your calories burned or consumed, you could still end up being way off, even if you feel like you're being super meticulous with the measuring and the tracking. So again, thinking of it as one particular tool, it may or may not work for you, but try not to get so defeated or so frustrated when the math isn't penciling out because the tool in and of itself is almost a little bit broken to start with.
Speaker 1:For some people they can track food and calories and macros and be fine mentally and emotionally, for other people not so much. Either way, it's entirely neutral, right? Calories in, calories out, your weight, all of those things are neutral numbers and aren't going to have the same meaning from person to person to person. And these tools of tracking and calculating and things like that is simply just one tool that you could use. If it works for you.
Speaker 1:If you have a history of disordered eating or eating disorders, then likely counting or tracking food is maybe not going to be the best strategy for you. Sometimes that can create that food obsession, that body obsession, and a lot of mental and emotional stress. So you just want to kind of look back at your history or if you're currently tracking and just notice is this causing some mental or emotional anguish or or undue stress? That might not be the exact strategy for you. However, with all of my clients, I encourage and teach them to also learn to be able to go off of their body's hunger and fullness cues, satiety, satisfaction levels right. We want to know how certain foods feel in your body. Do they make you feel bloated or gassy? Does your body do okay with certain foods and not really okay with other foods? Right? So, aside from knowing how to gauge your hunger, we want to focus on eating slow, without distraction, without stress, as we know that being distracted, being stressed, can really impact our metabolism and, ultimately, how our body ends up absorbing or using nutrients.
Speaker 1:So some other factors that can impact your metabolism. So your BMR, your basal metabolic rate. Remember that's simply the energy that you need to just fuel your organs and your basic bodily, biological functions to stay alive. But even this number can vary by 15 percent, right. For the average woman or man that ends up calculating to be about 200 to 270 calories, right. So just based on your gender. You can have some differences there with your BMR. Another factor that can affect the BMR as well is your amount of muscle mass. So we know that muscle is metabolic. It burns calories, even at rest. Fat not so much. So the more muscle mass you have, the higher your basal metabolic rate is going to be, without you necessarily having to do anything other than the weight training, the resistance training and things like that.
Speaker 1:Genetic differences matter as well. So, for example, just one change in one single gene can be an additional 160 calorie difference, right? So that would be something that would be highly out of your control, right? There? I mean, of course there's the science of epigenetics, but by and large, for most of us we really can't control our genes, right? So just knowing that even some fact, some changes happening on a genetic level, can be one factor in changing your metabolism or impacting it. Sleep deprivation can also cause a 5 to 20 percent change in your metabolism. So that could potentially be 200 calories all the way up to possibly 500 calories For women.
Speaker 1:The phase of their menstrual cycle can also affect their metabolism by another 150 calories or so. So you can see, right then and there, based on your gender, based on muscle mass, based on what your genes are doing, sleep deprivation, where you're at in your menstrual cycle All of those things can impact your metabolism. So, theoretically, even in the same person, your metabolism could fluctuate by a hundred calories from one day to the next, or possibly even the course of a day. This is another reason it becomes really hard to track with super precise, perfect accuracy the calories in and the calories coming out, because it's a little bit tricky to know exactly what our metabolism is doing on Any given day. So, as you can see, there are a lot of different factors that can end up manipulating or messing with your metabolism, and while we often want a simple calculator or formula, it doesn't always work out that way in real life, not to mention the additional stress you may be experiencing from tracking and counting your food or stressing over the scale and the number and not Seeing the scale moving the way that you want. This can kind of back Back track or thwart all of your efforts and ultimately end up working against you.
Speaker 1:So if you find that you're stressing out about food and calories, your body, your weight, we would want to work on all of those things as well as the habits right, as well as the behaviors around food, as well as what you're eating, as well as making sure that you're getting Adequate energy, adequate calories, protein all of those things for your body and your activity level. So some steps that you can follow. Step one get in tune with what hunger, fullness and satisfaction feels like in your own body. Work to eat to a feeling of satiety and satisfaction, without ever Allowing yourself really to get into that ravenous feeling or that feeling of being stuffed most of the time. Work on healing your relationship to step food or to food. This is step three your weight and your body. So really work on healing the way that you think about food, feel about food, your body, your weight, getting to the root cause of what is stressing you out about food, about exercise, about your body, so that you can ultimately end up start feeling good in the body that you're in now, nourishing it with food, moving it daily and taking care of yourself Not only physically, but mentally and emotionally as well. Right, for some people, this looks like putting the weight loss goal on the back burner, while we focus on just building some trust around food, cleaning up the way that you think about food or use food, exercise and really just building some healthy habits without the diet mindset being that driving factor.
Speaker 1:Step four getting you eating the right amount of food for your body and your goals With ha, without having to think about it so much. This is really where the power of habits kicks in. Once we can understand your current habits, your current behaviors and what's driving those habits, we can start to work on that root cause while also simultaneously creating and building those healthier habits, so that then it becomes so much easier to just follow through with the thing that you want to do. Once we have those habits and those routines in place. All right, just to recap, your metabolism is unique to you and it is highly Complex. There are many factors that impact the energy burning and the energy coming in. Your metabolism can change from day to day, possibly even from hour to hour. Calorie trackers, counters and calculators aren't as reliable as we think. So take that information with a grain of salt, recognizing that there is a large margin of error and it could possibly be just one tool that may or may not work for you in the long run.
Speaker 1:Work on your habits around food and untangle any emotional or mental drama that you might have about food or the scale, while Working on the habits that you want to be creating. Having a healthy relationship to food exercise in your body is important to living a healthy and fulfilling life, really at any shape, weight or size. If this is an area that you've been struggling in and you're ready for that struggle to finally stop, I can help. I would like to teach you a three pronged approach. It's the mental, the physical and the emotional. So, shifting the diet mindset, letting go of the restriction, the deprivation and the fear of the scale, while also changing or building those habits to support the healthy, fit lifestyle you want to be living. And then also helping you understand the emotions that are driving your current actions around food and Exercise to help you stop the over or the emotional eating.
Speaker 1:If this sounds like something that you are interested in learning more about, I want to invite you to email Alicia at Alicia Carlson calm. I'd love to chat with you to hear a little bit more about what's going on, what you've tried, and then help you figure out the best Strategy so that you can move forward without feeling like you ever have to diet again. I hope that this was helpful for you. Like I said, the metabolism is a super complex thing that they don't even scientists don't even fully understand. So use the trackers as one possible tool, if, of course, it doesn't cause some Back end consequences mentally or emotionally. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks again for hanging out with us and I'll talk to you again soon.