Have you ever wondered if eating too little is making you fat? Well, surprisingly it is making you fat and in this week's podcast episode I'm breaking down the common scenarios where this happens for women over 35.
It's fascinating to me as a nutrition practitioner that I spend MORE time coaching women to eat MORE food and properly fuel their bodies then I spend coaching clients to eat less food.
Everyone knows the formula for weight loss is eat less, exercise more and that you need a calorie deficit to lose weight. The problem is your metabolism is not as simple as that. It's actually more complex.
Many women have done years of dieting which have resulted in them losing weight and gaining weight. When you lose weight you always lose some muscle. The problem is when you gain the weight back you gain all fat back.
Not muscle so now you have a WORST body composition. Less muscle, more fat on your body equals less calories you burn at rest making it harder for you to lose weight. This puts significant stress not only on the metabolism, but also on you mentally.
The metabolism is an adaptive mechanism and for some women, they have trained their bodies to run off less fuel. They're inconsistent with meals, meals are not well balanced and they're deficit in high quality nutrition. They complain they feel tired, have low energy, can't sleep well, have a low sex drive, have hunger and cravings and can't lose weight.
I recommend you make notes with this podcast episode as it covers a lot on how eating too little causes weight gain.
In this Dish on Ditching Diets podcast episode, you will hear:
- How eating too little is making you fat
- Common scenarios of eating too little
- How most women are making weight loss harder by working against their metabolism
- Why metabolic stress is important consideration for women over 35
- How eating more food helps you lose weight
Listen To The Full Podcast Episode:
Never Missing An Episode! Subscribe to the Dish On Ditching Diets Podcast iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher or Spotify
Eating Too Little Is Making You Fat Transcript
I know this is going to sound so weird to all of you guys, because when we think about weight-loss we think exercise more, eat less food.
That must be the magical solution to lose weight. It's not, and there's a lot of reasons for that which I'm going to try to break down to you as simply as I can today, because I think you don't realize how much damage you're doing to your metabolism and how much harder you're making it to lose weight.
When you take this approach over and over again, which many of you are, and you know, the really fascinating thing about this topic is that I've been coaching women over 35 for many years now and this is the thing I see over and over again.
I don't see people who are just like totally overeating and, you know, crushing Mcdonald's meals all day long. I don't see that. I see people who are chronically under feeling their bodies.
They have low-energy they have insane hunger and cravings. They feel kind of out of control with the hunger and cravings. They feel like they need to do something extreme to get out of the hunger and cravings. So they go on Whole 30 during January.
They do Keto, low carb or they do fasting, or they do some kind of drastic thing to try to get them out of that holiday sugar rush that they feel like they have because they feel so gross and disgusting from the holidays. And so they kind of do this like pendulum swing, like you know, either they're really sedentary, they do nothing and they just eat whatever they want, they don't pay attention to how what they eat makes them feel.
And then, you know, they swing to the other direction, the opposite end of the spectrum, where they like really restrict, really cut all the things down, really don't eat hardly anything, and then they feel like crap.
They can't stick with it very, very long, and the worst part about it is that they actually think that there's something wrong with them. They think I'm a failure because I couldn't stick with it.
Well, that extreme way that you were trying to do nobody could stick with that like you were trying to be perfect and the only way you could get results was by being perfect. Nobody can be perfect. Perfectionism just is not attainable.
So I mean that's like the worst thing that results when we kind of swing back and forth between these extremes, and that's why I see a lot of women doing.
They're in like the extreme of really restricting, or they are the extreme of, you know, just doing nothing, and neither of those extremes is healthy.
Think about it like from a health perspective, being sedentary. Definitely it's not healthy eating whatever you want, not paying attention to how you fuel your body, not paying attention to how food makes you feel that's not healthy, but also restricting, obsessing over food, underfueling your body.
That's not healthy either, and your metabolism hates that. It doesn't make you feel good. And so then what inevitably what we end up doing is, we just kind of swing back and forth back and forth, back and forth back and forth, and what I talked a lot to my clients about is being in the middle ground.
Actually in my podcast called All or Nothing Mindset that I did way back in the day, it's one of the very, very early podcasts. It's a fantastic podcast if you haven't listened to it yet listen, all or nothing mindset, I talk exactly about this middle ground, finding the middle ground. That's where your lifestyle exists.
Because can you do a shake program the rest of your life? Can you do Whole 30 the rest of your life? Can you do Paleo the rest of your life? Can you do Keto the rest of your life if you can, and it makes you feel phenominal, then keep doing it.
But if it's something you're like, oh my gosh, I can't wait till I get off of this so I can just like eat my favorite food. Then it's not going to last long term and I don't think we really logically think about this when we start. I also don't think we logically think about the damage we're doing to our metabolism when we do this pendulum swing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
So here's a few examples of how eating too little is making you fat. The first one: let's take the scenario of you go off and do a diet and you lose 30 pounds. And we did a Dexascan before and after you did the diet, to figure out what was your body composition before and after how much muscle versus how much fat.
And let's say, of the 30 pounds you lost 18 pounds of fat and 12 pounds of muscle. So when we lose weight, the first concept you need to understand is that a little bit of muscle loss is very normal. It's expected, but here is the kicker.
Most of us are doing things that are ripping muscle and water weight off us very rapidly and we lose a lot of muscle. Why is this a problem? It's a problem because the less muscle you have, the fewer calories you burn.
So you might be noticing that a lot of people on social media these days are preaching about protein, preaching about strength training. I preach about it here on the podcast over and over again. I preach about it on my instagram, I preach about it on my website, I preach about it in my free weight loss class.
It's everywhere and I think women don't understand that there's a high value in doing these things, because when you have more muscle mass you burn more calories at rest, which means you can have a lot more flexibility with what you eat.
You can go eat a higher calorie meal and your body is going to rebound off of that pretty quickly. You're not going to gain five pounds over night because your body is burning more calories. Naturally, at rest you have a higher basal metabolic rate when you have more muscle mass.
So now you've gone and lost 30 pounds. 18 of it was fat, 12 of it was muscle. And now let's say you regain that 30 pounds, but you've now regained 30 pounds of fat. Now guess what's happened? You not only gained 30 pounds, you now have a slower metabolism because your metabolism is burning fewer calories because you don't have as much muscle mass, you have 12 pounds less of muscle mass and a lot more fat.
Now I want you to also think about how many times throughout your life have you lost weight, gained weight, lost weight gain weight, lost weight gain, weight lost weight, gained weight because the number of times you have done that to yourself, that puts incredible stress on the metabolism and you are probably just gaining fat and fat and fat and fat, and so you're making your calorie burn your basal metabolic rate lower and lower and lower and lower.
So now, the next time you go to do it, it's a lot harder to lose weight and you have to go to more extremes. So this is one scenario I see all the time, and it comes down to a lot of women not realizing how damaging doing some of these crash and burn approaches are to their bodies and even if it's not a crash and burn approach, maybe it's just something you couldn't sustain long term. You didn't really create a lifestyle, you could only do it for like six months.
You know you're still gaining the weight back, you're still creating that same scenario within your body. Really important for you to understand that. The other scenario I see many of my clients in is they are eating way too few calories and some of the things that they have done in the past in terms of different diets and approaches that they've taken, is that you know those approaches have literally trained them to eat very little food, and so then they come to me and they're really confused because they're like, well, I'm hardly eating anything.
Why am I not losing weight? Here is the problem we have. Let's say, you're eating about 800 calories a day, well your metabolism is adaptive, it adapts to the 800 calories. It figures out like how can I preserve all of this 800 calories to get by on?
Even, you know, even though you're not going to feel really great on those 800 calories you're going to have low-energy and you're not going to sleep very well and you are going to have a lot of hunger and cravings pop-up. Your body is going to figure out how to preserve that, to keep you alive.
So now, if you were to try to lose weight, you would have to eat like 500 or 600 calories and you would feel even worse. Trying to eat 500 or 600 calories like you would never be able to sustain that, and then if you were to try to eat more food, you would gain weight.
And I do see a lot of women in this in this scenario and it creates a lot of stress on them mentally, but it also creates a lot of stress on the metabolism. Now I know there's a lot of confusion out there, because some people say: well, what about starvation mode? Let's clarify something.
There is no such thing as starvation mode. There is metabolic adaptation. Metabolic adaptation is exactly what I just said. Your body figures out how to preserve the little bit of energy it's still getting from you. So if you were on a deserted island, of course you would lose weight from eating less, but it would be over a very extended period of time.
It wouldn't be like well, within six months I'm going to drop 300 pounds. You wouldn't, your body would downregulate to try to keep you alive as long as possible. Most of us when we're eating 800 calories and we're kind of sitting around that lower calorie number and it doesn't have to be 800. It could be 1200 or 1400, whatever it is that you've trained your body to survive on.
What ends up happening is for a lot of us, because we don't live on a deserted island and because food is so readily available. What we end up doing is we do overeat and we don't realize it. So maybe let's say, you're eating about 800 calories. That's kind of what you average day today and then you're like.
Oh, it's Saturday. I'm going to get a hamburger and fries about a 1000 calories. Now, from your metabolism's perspective, you're in a surplus. You're not in a deficit, you're in a surplus.
So now you're gaining weight, you're like scratching your head like, well, hardly eat anything. It was just a hamburger and fries. It's hardly any food. Yeah, it's not that much food, but it's a lot of calories right.
You could eat. You know a bigger meal with higher quality foods for probably half that amount of calories. Right. And that's where quality of food matters more than sometimes just the number of calories, because we can eat a lot more food when it's a higher quality nutrition.
But all of that to say that a lot of us get really confused because we're like, oh my gosh, I'm hardly eating anything. Why am I not losing weight? Well, one, because you're really eating to the maintenance that you have trained your metabolism to sit at and you are likely overeating periodically and you don't realize it, and I hate saying that to people.
But it really is the truth that you're eating at that number that you have trained your metabolism to get comfortable with. And then you have these like splurges periodically.
And you know in your mind you're like well, it was just one episode of hamburger and fries. How could that be? Like I said, in order for you to lose weight, you would have to eat 500 or 600 calories now to achieve a deficit, and most women are finding that they're gaining weight in this scenario again.
Because from their metabolism's perspective, you are in a surplus, you are eating above that 800 calorie mark or whatever you have trained your body to get accustomed to.
You're eating over that mark. So maybe two days in a row you're eating 800 calories, but then you've got a day where you're eating 2000 or 3000 calories. So in terms of averages, you're in a surplus, and so this is a common complaint I get from women.
I'm hardly eating anything and I'm gaining weight. Yes, because eating too little is making you fat, because from your metabolism's perspective you are really eating surplus.
You're eating very little, then you overeat, you're eating very little then you overeat. Most of us don't really kind of put this piece the puzzle together in our heads. All we see is that we ate really well for a couple of days and then we're like well.
I had one hamburger and fries, and I know Megan says I don't need to be perfect to lose weight. So why am I not losing weight? Because I'm hardly eating anything. Well right, because quality and quantity matters and consistency also matters.
And if you are you most of the time, doing this kind of dance where you're eating 800 calories, 800 calories and then having a splurge with 2000 or 3000 caloires, this all averages out to like, you know, a surplus.
So yeah, you're going to see weight gain in this type of scenario, and this is a very frustrating scenario for a lot of women, because they have trained their bodies to eat so little food.
And this is a lot of the issues that I see from women is that they have done so many of these approaches and diets in the past that have taught them to do this stuff, that this is kind of where they're sitting.
And now they've trained their body and their metabolism to sit in this place. And a common complaint I get from clients is: well, I'm just not hungry. Why should I be eating if I'm not hungry?
Listen, if you're sitting down here and you're hardly eating any food, you're not fueling your body, you have low-energy, your digestion isn't working, your sleep isn't working. You're feeling like you're really stress reactive, you're mood is all over the place, you have periodic hunger and cravings for sugar and carbs.
These are all symptoms and the most unfortunate part about this scenario is there's many doctors who are promoting this scenario. I've had, I think, my client, Karen, who was on this podcast a while back, Karen did one of those doctor led programs where she was eating like 800 calories.
So one of the things we worked on with Karen was eating more food and unfortunately, for 99.9% of my clients, this is what I have to work on with them is getting them to eat more food, and I actually have a doctor who is working with me in the program right now and she said to me the other day: well, shouldn't I be hungry if I have to lose weight?
No, you should not be hungry if you're losing weight, if you are hungry, you're doing it wrong. That is direct feedback from your metabolism. Something's wrong. We're not getting the right nutrients. We're not getting enough nutrients.
Something is going on and we have to dive into that, and I think most of us have just been culturalized to think that in order to lose weight I need to be starving all the time. No, you're doing it wrong. If that is the approach.
Think about this. Are you going to be starving the rest of your life? Because, however you lose your weight is how you're going to maintain your weight. We have to think about this long term maintenance. Maintenance is got to be part of your objective going in.
If you don't think you can maintain Keto for the rest of your life, why are you doing it? If you don't think you can maintain eating low carb the rest of our life why are you doing it? If you don't think you can maintain starving yourself or eating 800 calories the rest of your life then you shouldn't be doing it to lose weight, cause it's just going to end up being a throwaway and failure.
And, like I said in the first scenario, you likely are going to end up regaining weight, regaining fat, having a slower basal metabolic rate, meaning you're going to burn fewer calories at rest, because now you got more body composition of fat than muscle.
So this is a big wake up call for a lot of you that you can't be doing these things to your body; like we have to shift the mentality into fueling your body with high quality, nutrient, dense foods and getting more of it. One of the biggest complaints I get from my clients is: I'm eating so much food!
Yeah, you're eating higher quality nutrition, you're getting a lot of it and when you're eating higher quality nutrition, frankly you can eat a lot more of it because it doesn't have as many calories as like a hamburger and fries.
And I'm not saying a hamburger and fries isn't fine to have every once in a while. But you know what else are we doing around that? You know, are we just skipping meals and then having a hamburger and fries?
Because that's not very helpful from your metabolism's perspective. So we want to kind of look at the big picture and see what's going on.
The other scenario I see a lot with clients is they are like they're kind of in this extreme healthy clean eating mindset and they're really exercising a lot, and I've had many clients like this throughout the years where you know they're doing 3 hours a day of exercise.
I mean like exercise is literally like taken over their lives and for some of them they have, you know, lost weight taking that approach, and so now mentally they're like... well, if I stopped doing that exercise, I'm going to gain all my weight back.
They are also experiencing a lot of symptoms, lot of hunger, lot of cravings, poor sleep, really stressed reactive, feeling really mentally worn down, their moods all over the place.
They are, you know, just not feeling like themselves. They might be having some hormonal side-effects - hairs falling-out, nails are brittle, you know their sex drive is low, they might be missing periods or their periods have gone away altogether.
They've got osteopenia going on. So there could be a lot of other things that are happening and it's all a direct result of too much exercise and doing too much. And here's the problem.
If you're somebody who's exercising 3 hours a day, you need to eat more food to support exercising 3 hours a day. Why? Because your metabolism is going to adapt, it's going to start to preserve energy around that, because it's got to support and prioritize the 3 hours a day.
You're pushing too hard, and one of the fascinating things I've seen with clients who are in this camp is that when they start to pull the reins way back on the exercise and start to fuel their body with more food, all of sudden they start losing weight.
Doesn't that sound awsome? Now you can exercise less now. You got more free time! Now you're sleeping better. Now your digestion's working. Now your sex drive is coming up.
All these other things are starting to turn around and you're losing weight. I know it sounds crazy, but I see it time after time after time. So all of this to say that you know, I think what we all miss and don't realize when it comes to weight loss is that eat less and exercise more is a faulty approach.
And you know the main problem with this is stress. Women are the childbearing sex, so the female body at any age is going to act like a stress barometer and almost every client of mine who comes to me complaining that she can't lose weight is making these types of mistakes.
They're eating too little, exercising too much, really inconsistent with meals. The quality of their food is not necessarily as high as it could be. So too much exercise combined with eating too little food is going to be just as stressful on the female body as eating too much food and not exercising enough. So remember what I said earlier about this pendulum swing.
We swing back and forth. Like during December - I'm just going to eat whatever I want because it's the holidays. I'm not going to pay attention to how it makes me feel. I'm not going to move my body, I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to sit around because I'm too busy and stressed, whatever.
And then January comes around and we swing to the other side of the pendulum because we feel so gross and lethargic from all of the things we did in November and December.
And then we're like, oh, I got to cut out all the sugar, I need a sugar detox, I need to go on Whole 30 for 30 days. I need to go on Keto because I am a problem because I'm out of control and then we swing back and forth in back and forth right, and so we're now creating a lot of stress on ourselves mentally.
We're creating a lot of stress on the metabolism and, like I said, any weight that you might be losing. You're going to gain it back in fat.
And now your going to have a slower metabolism because you're going to burn fewer calories, because you have more fat and not enough muscle, this pendulum swing the, you know, eating too much, exercising too little and the other side of it just doing nothing over eating, not paying attention either of those extremes, result in imbalanced hormones that increase your hunger and cravings and drive your energy right into the ground.
And guess what, you don't sleep. Your digestion is going to be off, your mood's going to be off, sex drive might go lower, you might lose hair, you might have all of these other side-effects going on.
So the strategy of just eating less and exercising more is a major stress on the female body and it becomes an even bigger stress for women over 35. So if you haven't taken my free weight loss course, you need to take it. Why?
Because I talk about all the changes that happen during perimenopause and menopause and why, when we just focus on eating less and exercising more, this becomes a real problem for women. So the female body, like I said, is very, very sensitive to stress and your body's going to always drive us to homeostasis.
So if you think about it, when you've done an extreme diet in the past there was at a point where you got really hungry. There was a point where you had a lot of cravings and those urges felt very, very strong, like you couldn't resist them and it wasn't a problem with you.
That was a problem with your metabolism saying you're putting too much stress on me and you weren't listening, and so then inevitably we eat more food because your body is trying to drive you back to homeostasis.
It's trying to get you to a safer place. It's sensing all of that stress. The change is too drastic when you're losing weight. The changes should be so small and subtle, and that's really the difference between a weight loss program and a fat loss program.
Most people are going after weight loss they want to see the number on the scale go down. What I teach my clients about is fat loss. We want to see your inches go down. I'm pretty sure you would be pretty happy if you were a smaller pant size and you wouldn't really care so much about the number on the scale.
I mean you might, but if your pants size were lower and you're able to fit into the clothes that you wanted to fit into, you would probably not care as much about the number on the scale. Right?
So, and unfortunately, I think a lot of women are kind of going after the wrong things and doing the things that are really making it harder for them to lose weight because they don't understand these mechanisms in their body. Even this doctor, who's a client of mine, she didn't really understand that.
You know being hungry is a real problem from your metabolism's perspective and there's always going to be that rebound effect where you know if your body is going to try to get you back to homeostasis and if you do gain weight back, you know you're actually going to be, you know, gaining more fat and having a slower basal metabolic rate.
So that's a real problem and unfortunately many women have been dieting for years, often decades of their lives, which means the metabolism is a lot less flexible due to the chronic stress of dieting.
And now you're a woman who's over 35. You're going though perimenopause. You're going through menopause and during this time-frame because of the fluctuations in progesterone and estrogen, primarily, your body is more stress sensitive.
You might realize that there are times when you're kind of freaking out more about stuff that you shouldn't be, because you've got some fluctuations in your hormones that are going on during this phase of life.
So this is why you do need to have a smarter approach to your weight loss. You do need to kind of wrap your mind around how the female physiology works.
How your metabolism works and learning how to work with your body, not against your body. Notice all the things I talked about today. You're actually making it harder to lose weight and this is the stuff I see over and over again and, like I said, it's so fascinating to me because you know everybody thinks that I just need to pay attention to the calories.
I just need to force myself and have enough will power to eat in this calorie deficit. I hear this a lot from clients. Well, shouldn't I be in calorie deficit to lose weight?
Yeah, but if your body has been trained to eat 800 or 1200 calories most of the time, you know you would have to eat even less to get any type of weight loss and you are just going to be on to struggle bus trying to maintain that consistently.
And we know you only achieve weight loss by doing something consistently. So if you did something in the past, let's say you did a bootcamp at your gym and they gave you a meal plan and you lost weight, doing this and you lost weight and you gained it back.
And then you tried to go back and do the bootcamp and the meal plan and it didn't work. This is why, because your metabolism is now adapted and because you probably gained a bunch of fat back. So now you've got a worse body composition and your metabolism is slower right, your basal metabolic rate is slower.
So, yes, calories matter, but the hormones that control your metabolism matter more and the quality of food that you eat matters more, so you can eat 1200 calories of hamburgers and fries all day long, but you're going to feel like junk and you're going to have more cravings.
So there's more to the picture, guys, than just eating less and exercising more. And this is something I really try to stress with my clients in my program and I'll be honest, some of my clients really struggle in the beginning because they want to see the immediate outcome of losing weight like they have with every other diet.
That's the difference between a weight loss program and a fat loss program. Fat loss - you're in it for the long haul you're waiting for fat loss to come. I mean think about it this way.
Do you go to the gym every single day and then come home and look in the mirror and think I should see muscle growth in the mirror? No, you go to the gym every single day and you just do it until it shows up. Same with weight loss or fat loss.
It's the same thing. You have to get really into the mode of practicing your habits, focusing on getting really good at that process, instituting that process in your lifestyle and not focusing so heavily on when the weight loss going to happen.
When am I going to see the number on the scale go down? That's not really helping you and in fact it's causing you to do some of these really crazy, erratic things, like skipping meals and not really paying attention to the quality of food on your plate, not really making sure that you're eating three balanced meals a day.
So, if you were to think about your children, like if you were to take your child or even your pet, would you like literally starve your kids if they had weight to lose or starve your pet? Would you put your pet on Keto to get them to lose weight as fast as possible?
Like if you wouldn't be willing to do that to your kids or to your pet, then you probably shouldn't be doing it yourself right? And just because you're not hungry doesn't mean that you shouldn't be eating.
Most of the time, women have trained themselves, like I said, to just not be hungry. They have created a lower set point with their metabolism, and inevitably what that means is that you have to start eating more food, and for a lot of women that really starts to scare them.
Because, you're like, well, that means I'm going to gain weight. No, not necessarily. I had a client recently who gained 10 pounds and lost 13 inches. She is eating about 3 times the amount of food that she used to eat. She's feeling great.
She doesn't care about the number on the scale. Guess why? Because she's 2 pant sizes smaller. Sometimes we can't focus so much on the outcome. We have to focus first and foremost, in my opinion, on how we are fueling our body and how we are feeling.
And if we don't feel good, if we've got insane hunger, we've got insane cravings. That's all symptoms, guys, and I think a lot of us don't realize that this is what's going on in your body.
This is how your metabolism is wired to work, and if you are a female over 35, stress is a big part of this, because this all creates stress in the body, and the more stress you create, the more resistant your body is going to be to losing weight.
And one of the things, if you've taken my free weight lost course that I talked about in that course is the studies from the Biggest Loser. If you have seen that TV show that they did way back in the past with Jillian Michaels, they took these people and put them on extreme calorie restrictive diets.
They were working out multiple times a day insanely, and what all of these studies show was that the metabolism rebounded. Just like I'm telling you here, I'm not making this stuff up.
Harvard medical school did a study on this as well and backed this up, as well as some, as many other studies that I share in that free weight loss course.
So the more that you take these approaches, you know the harder it's going to be, and this is honestly from my personal perspective, is one of the problems I have with some of the weight loss surgeries and that are out there, because it doesn't really help you address your metabolism, doesn't really address the behaviors that are causing you to overeat food.
It's not helping you figure out like how to create a lifestyle, how to learn how to put your food together, how to learn to listen to your body. So you go and do weight loss surgery and I have so many clients to have gone through this traumatic, you know surgery, and then they come back to me and say: I went through the surgery and gained all the way back because they put you on an 800 calorie diet and you couldn't sustain that for very long.
No one's going to feel good on an 800 calorie diet and inevitably you're going to start to eat more food at some point because the surgery never addressed the eating behavior and why you were overeating in the first place, and so you're going to start to eat more food and over time you're going to start gaining the way back.
So, yes, eating too little results in you gaining weight back, and now you probably have a slower metabolism as a result of that surgery and eating too little too. But you have to do that when you have that kind of surgery.
But they don't really teach you like how do you create healthy habits? How do you, you know, deal with the behaviors that keep you going back to food? One of my clients, Deb, she's in menopause and she was struggling a lot with cravings and hunger and losing the belly fat, and one of the things that you know she recognized was that her cravings for sugar and candy was really a result of stress.
How she was dealing with day to day stress is. Is weight loss surgery teaching you that? I don't think so, because if they were, why would I have so many clients coming to me who have had those things? Who have done those traumatic things to their bodies, and you can't eat very much food when you do those things.
So there's always a consequence to the choice that you're making. So, as you are thinking about what you're going to be doing over the next couple of months, what approach you're going to be taking in this year for losing weight, I want you to really think about what I'm saying, because I know in January some of you are going to be so desperate to lose weight and you're going to try to swing that pendulum to the other side and do something really dramatic.
But is that dramatic thing going to actually cause you to make your weight loss journey longer and harder, because you're going to do more damage to your metabolism?
Those are the kind of questions you really need to ask yourself before you do any kind of program and you don't have to do my program. But I'm just telling you these things because I wish somebody had told me this a long time ago and I know for many of my clients it's a big aha moment when they start to really recognize that they've been making it harder, you know, and they can eat a lot more food and feel so much better.
And this is one of the fantastic things I see with my clients. They start to feel better, they start to fuel their body, they start to sleep better, their digestion and their mood is better. They have more energy. They're not sitting around as much anymore, they're just managing the day-to-day stress of their lives better and they're feeling better and losing inches.
I mean like who would ever think that I would be doing a podcast telling you that you can eat more food and lose weight?
But honestly, I think that so many of the diets and approaches that women have done in the past have taught them to do these extreme things that have really done these things to their metabolism.
To cause their basal metabolic rate to slow down, and then they're gaining fat back, and so they have a worse body composition, and the more times you do that, the worse and worse and worse your body composition gets.
So these are the things I want you to be considering as you approach your goals in this new year, because it's something I see over and over again and I never thought, as a nutrition practitioner, that this would be the primary focus of what I would talk to clients about is eating more food, because the underfueling really is making people fat and we've got good studies that back this up too.
The more people diet, the fatter they get. We see it all the time, and I actually have a study for that too in my free weight loss class too. So if you haven't taken my 5 Steps to Lasting Weight Loss, go watch that class.
I've got so many free resources for you guys and again you know, of course, if you are interested in one to one coaching, you can reach out to me and we can talk about whether you are fit for the program.
But I want you to know that there is a solution if you are in this camp of, like you know, really underfueling your body and not eating enough food, and you think you have now gained weight and lost weight and gained weight and lost weight over and over again throughout your life.
You know, if you think you are in that camp, then there is a solution and this is the stuff I work on with clients all of the time. So feel free to reach out to me if you want to set up a free consult and we can talk about your weight loss plan and how this would apply to you.
But I do want you to really take what I said today to heart, because I see too many lovely women over 35 in this camp. I'll talk to you soon!
I love hearing about what YOU want me to talk about so feel free to leave on comment here or on social media with topics you’d like me to cover!
Wanda says
I want to see what this free program about?
Megan says
I don't have a free program. I have a free podcast you can listen to. Just click the play button in the blog post to listen.