Hormonal Weight Loss is a smarter approach to losing weight for women over 35. I've been teaching this approach to women for years and they are always surprised how much easier weight loss is when they approach weight loss with hormones in mind.
After 35, female reproductive hormones and muscle mass are declining making their bodies highly sensitive to stress. Dieting, exercise and weight loss are stress on the body.
Taking a hormonal weight loss approach will help you lose weight with ease while eliminating hunger and cravings. This strategy sets you up for long-term success with losing weight and transforming your lifestyle.
During this Hormonal Weight Loss Dish On Ditching Diets episode you will learn:
- The 4 pillars of a hormonal weight loss approach
- Why hormonal weight loss is a smarter approach for women over 35
- How hormonal weight loss eliminates the two biggest hurdles to weight loss - hunger and cravings
- Plus 3 actionable steps to start your hormonal weight loss journey right now
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Hormonal Weight Loss Transcript
Today we're going to talk about hormonal weight loss and I'm going to explain to you what hormonal weight loss is for women over 35 so you can stop playing the yo-yo diet game of starting a diet, losing some weight and then stopping the diet and then gaining it all back.
And I'm going to explain to you why hormonal weight loss - why that approach is a smarter strategy to losing weight permanently, so that you can stop playing this game. And I'm also going to give you a couple of actions at the end of this podcast today that are going to help you get started with hormonal weight loss right now.
But first I want to explain to you what hormonal weight loss really is and how it is different from your typical diet. So every time you want to lose weight I'm guessing you probably go down the path of eating less and trying to exercise more, maybe cutting out some some food groups or even your favorite foods, and then trying to motivate yourself and rely on willpower and to eat really perfect and clean and all the things right?
So this may last a week or two. Most studies show that after two weeks of trying to do a diet most people fall off the wagon. Maybe you go a little bit longer, but in the long run this process or approach of trying to eat less exercise more does not work.
You always end up gaining more weight and then some in the long run and the process essentially just backfires, leaving you feeling always like what's wrong with me? Why can't I do this? Why can't I lose weight?
There must be something going on with me that I can't stick with this diet now. When I talk about it, I just want to be clear. I'm talking about one size fits all diets like Keto, Paleo, Whole 30, Nutrisystem, Jenny Crag, WW, macro counting.
Those approaches, don't take hormones into account. When you do those approaches, it actually puts a lot more stress on your metabolism and causes hormone imbalances with the hormones that control your hunger, energy and cravings.
And it leaves you craving more food and storing more fat. You see the two biggest hurdles that you have when it comes to losing weight is hunger and cravings.
If you can win the battle of hunger and cravings, then losing weight is a lot easier. It feels more effortless, and this is what I hear from my clients, because when you take a hormonal weight loss approach, you are controlling hunger and cravings because you understand how your hunger and cravings are affected by food, what type of food and how much of the food that you're eating.
These are very powerful bio-feedback signals in the body. So when you're hungry and you're having cravings for food and your energy is in the tank, guess who is going to win the battle? Your body! You're not going to win that.
And so if you're somebody who's like, why don't I just have enough will power to say no to carbs? The reason why you don't have enough willpower to say no to carbs is because your body, one needs some carbs, and two, you're probably not getting the right balance of foods to keep your hunger and cravings, the hormones that control your hunger and cravings in check.
This is why many women get in trouble and can't stick with a diet. You are in a losing battle, and you're making it harder to lose weight by not taking your hormones into account first.
So the way that I kind of like to think about this is, if you are counting calories, for instance, let's take that path. If you're counting calories and let's say you have 400 calorie donut and you have 400 calorie salad with avocado and salmon and tons of greens and veggies and maybe a little bit of sweet potato on that salad.
Each of them are 400 calories. But the problem is that with the 400 calorie donut, it's going to do things to your hormones that the 400 calorie salad that's really well-balanced isn't going to do. The 400 calorie salad, higher protein, higher fiber, and it's also got a good amount of fat. That's going to keep your hunger and energy and cravings really stable.
It's going to keep your hormones happy. It's going to help your metabolism because you've got a good balance of food there. You eat the 400 calorie donut. What's going to happen is insulin going to spike because you've got no protein to balance the insulin.
You've got no fiber. All you really have is sugar and fat. Two things that your body loves for storing fat is sugar and fat. So just because they're both the same calories, they don't have the same effect on your hormones in your body. And this is what so many women really fail to understand. Not all food is created equal.
If you have my cookbook, it's called the Low Calorie Cookbook, it's on my website, Skinny Fitalicious dot com, or you can actually get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, basically anywhere these days. If you have my cookbook, take it out.
There's a page in the cookbook where I actually have a graphic that shows this, and I talk all about hormones and how different calories and the breakdown of those calories can affect your hormones.
Overtime if you have trained your body to expect the sugar and the fat, you're going to be more hungry, you're going to have more cravings. So when you do something really drastic, like low carb or Keto, you're always going to be in a cycle of binging because you're not getting enough of the right type of carbs in your diet.
So your body's going to look for a quick fix. So this is why these these diet approaches just do not work. They simply do not work because you're not factoring in hormonal weight loss so I hope that makes sense. Here's a couple of pillars of hormonal weight loss that you really have to think about.
The first pillar is that hormonal weight loss reduces your hunger. Weight loss diets do the opposite. They increase your hunger, the typical diet is not taking into account hormones. What those diets are going to do is increase your hunger hormone, your hunger, hormone, ghrelin in particular.
So you're always not going to feel full and your brain is always going to tell your your belly and your stomach and your brain are always going to talk back and forth and they're not going to realize that you're full, and so you're always going to crave more food.
Every time you eat what you have to understand, it's an opportunity to give instructions to your hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers, they give instructions to the body. So when you eat food, the food gives instructions to the hormones.
Do you want to store fat? Do you want to release fat? Do you want to crave more food? Do you want to have good energy? The hormones are responding to the food that you're eating. And if you don't want to be hungry and you want to control the hormones that dictates your hunger level, then there are certain amounts and types of food you can be eating to dial your appetite and hunger down.
And this is what I work on with my clients is how to eat this way, so that they can go three to five hours in between meals without snacks. And this is a big difference between hormonal weight loss approach and a traditional diet program. The constant hunger and the need to eat frequently goes away, and you stop snacking, and this happens really quickly for some of my clients.
Now you're probably wondering well how you do this. It's not the same way for every single client. We start with certain portion sizes of food groups for my clients and then we dial the portion sizes up and down based on their lifestyle conditions and everything that's going on with them.
So everyone is different. Some clients need more fat, some clients need more protein, some clients need more carbs and we have to dial up the portion sizes up and down to get the right amount for them.
And I've been doing this long enough that I generally know for most women what's going to be appropriate. So that's the first pillar of hormonal weight loss. Hormonal weight loss reduces hunger. We kill hunger because again hunger and cravings. Those are your biggest enemies when you're trying to lose weight.
If you're on a diet you probably have a lot of hunger and cravings and it leads to binging and then falling off the wagon and then gaining more weight back. We want to control hunger and cravings. It's a much smarter approach to losing weight.
The second pillar of hormonal weight loss is it reduces or eliminates cravings. My clients are always totally blown away by how much their cravings go away or even just disappear altogether compared to a typical diet. You're always giving up some kind of food right.
You're always eating way less like drastically less, and you're always giving up food groups like carbs and sugar. So you're giving up carbs, you're giving up sugar.
You're not allowed to eat anything that you really enjoy, and number one, that psychologically impacts you because it makes you want to eat more of those foods. When you cut foods out of your diet, you are automatically going to be more prone to binging on them because psychologically it has an affect.
You get hyper focused on those foods. So a hormonal weight loss approach ensures you have the right amount of fat, protein and cabs at every meal so that you control your cravings and they virtually go away.
Once we get this balance really dialed in, a lot of women will come to me saying they have intense sugar and carb cravings or they just can't stop eating sugar and they just can't stop eating carbs in they're a sugar addict or carb addict.
No, the problem isn't the sugar and the carbs. The problem isn't that you're an addict. The real problem is you're not getting enough fat, protein and carbs with every single meal. That, imbalance, is what's setting off your cravings.
In hormonal weight loss those cravings disappear and I work with my clients to develop strategies. So when they do experience hunger or cravings or they want to eat a fun food or they have, you know, a night with their family or they're going out somewhere, they have a real strategy for going into that situation or dealing with that.
You know ignoring the cookies on the counter or ignoring the ice cream calling your name from the freezer, that's not a good strategy. Ignoring is not a good strategy. You have to practice eating food in moderation while you're losing weight.
Otherwise later on, when you do start eating those foods again, you're not going to know what to do because you didn't practice anything. So you're just going to over consume them. We have to get you practicing eating those foods while we're getting you the right amount of fat, protein and carbs at every single meal.
Hormonal weight loss approach is really going to get that hunger and end that craving under control. And you're no longer going to be a prisoner to that hunger and that intense pull toward sugar and carbs. It literally goes away once we get those things really dialed in and I see it all the time with clients.
They are so amazed by how quickly they get this under control and how much less they're snacking and kind of mindlessly grazing because they're eating bigger meals. They're really getting these portions under control and they're eating a lot more food than generally they have been in the past.
The third pillar of hormonal weight loss is that it increases your energy. This is one of the most amazing things that I see with my clients, and it happens very quickly as well. They get huge transformation with their energy.
So many women come to me with their energy in the tank. Some of them are napping in the afternoon and a lot of it has to do with stress, sleep and the food they're eating, or the foods they are not eating. How many times have you gone on a diet and you were just like dragging yourself through the day?
Like it was just painfully difficult for you to get through the day and then you're dieting on top of it? You're you're getting more tired, you're having lower energy while you're on the diet too? It's hard to stick with a diet if you're hungry, craving sugar and carbs and you have no energy; like it's impossible.
So if you're somebody who's like thinking, oh my gosh, what's wrong with me? It's because the approach you're taking taking with traditional diets, it's not working.
It's making it harder for you to lose weight. It's because you're cutting out too many foods, you're not fueling your body properly, and you're not paying attention to some of the lifestyle factors like sleep and stress.
I have clients who are in their 60's and 70's, who do my program and when they work with me they cannot believe how much energy they have and how bad their energy was before we started working together. And you know, my ladies, are of all ages.
They range from 35 all the way up to 70 and they are busy women. They have kids and jobs and grandkids and juggling life and volunteering and they are active in their communities. These women are not women who are just sitting home all day and have a lot of time to focus on their health. They are busy women.
I give them real strategies to deal with their busy lives and still follow the hormonal weight loss plan. Because when you really start putting the right amount of food and the type of food in your body and feeding and fueling your body what it really needs.
Then on top of that, managing your stress and sleep, your energy level is going to go way up and with diets you eat less, exercise more, cut out food groups and there are really good studies that show when you are in a prolonged calorie deficit or you're just not eating enough food, your daily movement goes down.
Your physiology naturally tells your body slow down and this is basically, your body, trying to conserve what little energy you're giving it. So you don't have a lot of gas in the tank. If you don't have any gas in your car, it's not going to go very far.
And that's what's happening with your body. So think about how many times in the past when you may have done a diet and you weren't eating very much food and you were working out, and really all you wanted to do was lay around and do nothing all day. You were just tired all the time. That was your body's physiology taking over.
That was not a lack of willpower or motivation. You are not imagining that you were tired. Your body was trying to conserve energy by slowing you down.
The female body is wired for reproduction and therefore survival, and so any time the body senses too much stress on the body, which dieting is stress, the body will conserve energy and store more fat. So you have to outsmart that physiology when you're coming at the problem of weight loss.
Hormonal weight loss, is going to turn your energy up and dieting is going to turn your energy down.
The last pillar of hormonal weight loss is that it improves your metabolism and is less stressful on the metabolism. I talk a lot about this with my clients. You know females are really more resistant to weight loss.
The female body again is designed for reproduction and to store fat. And when you do a diet and cut calories drastically or you're not eating enough food and you cut out certain food groups like carbs, you're putting a lot of extra stress on your body and your metabolism.
And then when you lay on day to day stress and exercise stress, you're just putting more stress on stress, on stress, on stress on the body, which is causing a hormonal ripple effect, causing cortisol to go up and then you're going to store more fat, particularly in the midsection.
So you're putting more stress on the body, but you also putting more stress on your metabolism. And now you're going to be storing more fat because you have all of this stress.
The good news is when you take a hormonal weight loss approach, you are not stressing out your metabolism the way that traditional diets do. Now I will say that it is true that you still must eat a little less than what your body needs to lose weight.
You must have a calorie deficit. You don't need to count calories to get into that calorie deficit. I use portion control with my clients to be able to get them in that deficit, but it's a very slight deficit and it very a lot less stress on the female body.
Because we're not doing 1200 calories, we're doing just a really small deficit. So I think a lot of times what many women do when they approach weight loss is they look at weight loss as a math calculation. They create these huge calorie deficits which literally freaks out the female metabolism and hormones at any age.
So you're thinking I must be, you know, losing three pounds this week because my online fitness tracker did the math and told me that I should be losing three pounds a week. And then you don't lose the three pounds. And you're like. What did I do wrong?
It's like you didn't do anything wrong. The reason that you didn't lose the weight is you probably were in a much too large of a calorie deficit and your metabolism is saying no, we're not going to do that!
With a hormonial weight loss approach we are creating a very slight calorie deficit which is kinder to your metabolism and it doesn't freak out your hormones. In fact, many of my clients see a lot of improvement with their hormones and we know this through labwork and their biofeedback.
So things like blood sugar stability improves. They become insuli sensitive. Numbers start to trend down for my prediabetes clients resting blood sugar. Some women, when they come to me, have very low progesterone because they're not eating enough carbs.
Their progesterone levels start to improve and others who have hashimoto's or thyroid issues. They're starting to see improvement in active thyroid hormone conversion, so those are just some areas where we start to see the improvement, and that improvement gradually starts to happen over time again.
Why does taking a hormonal weight loss approach matter so much? If you're a woman over 35, your body is even more sensitive to stress during this period of time because you're going through a transition in life.
It's a very small transition, starting around the age of 35, where your reproductive hormones are starting to decline. As those reproductive hormones are starting to decline, your body is starting to try to make some of those hormones to compensate.
So this is why we start to see some insulin resistance, since this is why we start to store more belly fat. The body is under a lot of stress, as this happens.
By the way, as you're losing the reproductive hormones after 35, as they're starting to decline, you are also losing muscle mass, and muscle mass is really important for your metabolism.
The more muscle you have, the better your metabolism is going to function. So as you're losing that muscle mass, you're also starting to notice that you're able to pack on the pounds a lot easier, because your metabolism is gradually slowing down.
Taking a hormonal weight loss approach means you're taking all of these things into consideration and you're working more with your body and not against your body which all of these diets out there do. I don't know of any diet out there that explains all this stuff to you.
Like when you sign up to do Keto, do they explain this stuff to you? Or when you sign up to do WW do they explain this stuff to you? No, it's different after 35 and, like I said at the beginning, your biggest hurdles when it comes to weight loss are hunger and cravings.
If you can take an approach with weight loss where it's really factoring in your hunger and cravings and you're getting the hunger and cravings dialed in and under control, you're getting your energy up. Guess what? Uou're able to stick with the diet.
It feels more effortless, it doesn't feel like you're actually on a weight loss diet, quote unquote, because it feels easier when you're not constantly battling low-energy intense hunger and cravings for carbs and sugar.
I keep saying this over and over again: there is an easier way, an easier approach than these diets that are out there. And if the diet that you do next does not explain this stuff to you, then you're wasting your time and money and you're more likely to lose a little weight and gain it back and then some, and I know that's not what you want to do, which is why I'm taking the time to explain this to you today.
Here's a couple of things that I want you to do to get started with hormonal weight loss. These are things that you you must know and understand and do in order to start on the path of hormonal weight loss the first thing is get rid of the scale.
The scale does not determine your success. The scale is only telling you how much you weigh. It's not telling you your body composition. In fact, I don't allow my clients to weigh themselves. The scale does not tell you how much of your body weight is muscle, water or fat.
It doesn't tell you any of that. You can do dexa scan, have your doctor write an order and you can get a dexa scan to find out where you are right now today. But you're not going to do that every single day.
And if you jump on this scale, the challenge is the scale is not going to reflect what's really going on. If you're doing the traditional diet approach of eating, way less and exercising more and cutting out foods then some of the weight that you're losing is muscle, and I see this a lot with women who are clients of mine who previously done low-carb or Keto.
They're like I gained the way back so quickly after I stopped doing those things. It's because you've lost primarily water and muscle. Yu didn't really lose true fat. In hormonal weight loss we work to retain your muscle mass because, like I said, after 35 you're gradually starting to lose muscle mass.
We are intentionally putting foods in your body that's going to promote muscle preservation and a healthy metabolism, and muscle is the thing that's going to give you that really lean, slender look.
Weighing less on the scale isn't necessarily going to result in a lean, slender look. Think about maybe a time in the past when you did a diet and the scale went down but your clothes didn't exactly fit right or your body didn't have like the best shape, even though the scale went down.
With hormonal weight loss I have my ladies take measurements and they also look at their biofeedback. So you know, every time I have a call with them I'm asking them about their energy, their hunger, their cravings, their digestion.
Those things are much better indicators of how you are succeeding with your goal of losing weight than the number on the scale. The number on the scale is not really that valuable, so throw out the scale.
It's not helping you and probably psychologically, it's doing you more harm than good. Number two: understand that every time you eat you have the opportunity to make your hormones more or less balanced.
I talked a little bit about this earlier, that hormones are chemical messengers. They deliver messages all throughout your body, and your metabolism and your body are constantly responding to those messages.
So what you eat and your lifestyle influences those messages. Food is information for your body. Food will tell your body if you should have more cravings, less cravings, if you should be more hungry, if you should be less hungry, if you're going to crave carbs or if your going to crave sugar, if you're going to have more energy or less energy, if you should go to bed or if you should go run a marathon.
The food that you're putting in your body is literally telling your body these things, so you can influence what's happening with your body. You can influence whether or not you're losing weight with the type of foods that you eat.
Every time you eat something, you have the opportunity to make your hormones more or less balanced. Every time you exercise it's the same thing. You have the opportunity to balance or imbalance your hormones.
Same thing with sleep and stress management. If you're not working on stress management, what are the signals that the stress is giving to your body when the female body after 35 is already really sensitive to stress?
The point of me saying this is for you to realize that you influence your hormones with all of these things and most of us don't realize this. Many women come to me and say they can't lose weight because their hormones are messed up.
But the thing is, hormones don't just get messed up, they don't just decide one day I'm going to get messed up. Hormones are responding to how you eat and how you live, and usually it gradually happens over a long period of time.
So if you're after 35 and you're struggling and you know you've got some hormonal imbalances, lots of cravings, you're storing a lot of belly fat. We know that means you've got some hormonal and balances going on with insulin, leptin and ghrelin.
And what that means is probably for several years, maybe decades, you have been eating and living in a certain way. That has led up to this point where your hormones have started to do this. They don't just one day wake up and say I'm going to do this and it doesn't happen from one meal.
It happens from consistently not putting the right types of food in your body and the amounts of food in your body over a long period of time. The hormones are literally responding to how you eat and how you live overtime.
Shifting your mindset around to the fact that the hormones aren't the problem. It's not their fault, it's more you having the control and the choice of whether or not you're going to give your body the right messages every time you eat food and every time you decide to exercise and how you sleep and manage your stress, you now understand that you have more control over what's happening with your body, what's happening with your hormones then what you are realizing.
And I think a lot of women don't recognize this. They just think their hormones are out of whack. They going to go to the doctor or get a blood test and take some pills.
You got to get the food, the lifestyle and the exercise under control, because that's the stuff that is telling the hormones what to do. And I wish more doctors really stress this to their patients, because food and lifestyle is so much. I mean 80 to 90% of this is food and lifestyle.
Understand again that every time you eat you have the opportunity to make your hormones more or less balanced and you have the opportunity to tell those hormones whether or not you want to store or release fat.
Number three - realize that hormonal weight loss is a lifestyle transformation and there is no deadline. There is no in three weeks I'm going to figure out if I think this is working and I'm going to hop on the scale.
There's no more of that. This is a lifestyle transformation. It doesn't matter how long it takes.
You're not going to lose weight at a certain rate and get there by a certain date. No, no more of that. Give yourself the time you need to practice the habits, to learn new strategies and to establish new routines.
This is not something you do for a few weeks and then go back to your old ways. With hormonal weight loss you need a sustainable and slow approach and you need to enjoy it.
Remember what I said earlier: after 35, the body is already under a lot of stress because of how the female body is is changing and you want to go slow because you don't want to freak out your metabolism and your hormones.
So we have to get out of the mindset that this should be like a three or six-week transformation. You didn't get to this point after just three or six weeks.
That's not enough time to assess whether or not things are going well. You have to give yourself at least six months to a year before turning around and saying okay, this didn't work, or we need to adjust something.
Six months to one year and you need to go slow and you need to focus on practice. Practicing new habits. This is not like a diet where you count points or you count calories or you buy somebody's packaged food until you lose weight and then you stop and you just go back to eating whatever you want or you cut all the carbs and sugar until you lose weight and then you stop and you eat all the carbs and sugar.
Those approaches do not work and those approaches are exactly why you are here, where you don't want to be. You're not quite there yet, and those approaches are why you are struggling; believing that you can lose weight and feel great.
Listen just because you haven't found success yet, doesn't mean that you are never going to succeed. You have just been given a lot of really bad information.
You have not been taught the science of weight loss and you have not taken a hormonal weight loss approach. Those diets don't teach you real strategies to eat foods, that you enjoy normal foods, so that you can lose weight without increasing your hunger and cravings, but recognize that your mindset has to be that learning these new skills takes time and you have to practice these new skills.
So think of it this way. If your child or your grandchild came home from school one day and they failed to test and they were really upset, would you be like you're such a failure?
Don't bother going to school tomorrow? You would never say that to your child right! You would encourage them and love them and be empathetic and say you know what?
Tomorrow your going to try harder, you're going to get some help, you're going to get some support and accountability and we're going to help you so that you can learn this subject really well so you can pass your next exam.
It's the same thing with weight loss but so many women don't think about it that way. They think that they should be able to just like get the new habits down in one day.
They go from Sunday to Monday and they think they should just be able to be perfect. No, you haven't practiced the new skills long enough to make it a lifestyle transformation.
Give yourself six months to one year before you tell yourself it didn't work or it's not working, or you're a failure. Then let's talk, but you are important and you deserve to take the time you need to practice new habits, practice new skills and remember, just because you haven't gotten success yet with lasting weight loss does it mean that you're never going to experience success.
The only way you don't ever experience success is if you keep doing one sized fits all diets which you know don't work. Taking those shortcut approaches don't work.
Just to recap, taking a hormonal weight loss approach gets you out of the diet game. It gets you out of this cycle of eating less exercising more, cutting out food groups and relying on willpower and motivation to power through.
Dieting puts stress on your metabolism and causes hormones to become imbalanced, and it causes us to crave more food, particularly carbs and sugar, because we're not putting the right types of food and amounts of food in our body on a regular basis.
When you do these diets, you're going to have low-energy intense hunger and intense cravings. When you take a hormonal weight loss approach, it's smarter because you are getting the hunger and the cravings really under control, which are your two biggest culprits, and you're getting your energy up, and it's easier to stick to a hormonal weight loss strategy than it is to follow one of these diets that are out there.
I've done all these diets myself at point in my life, and it's really taken me a long time to kind of realize that the slow way was the best way and it was also the time that I needed in order to practice those new skills.
I really emphasise this with my clients, because so many of them get frustrated when they can't master something right away, and I have to have this conversation with everyone.
So if this is something that you find yourself in the trap of feeling like you should be abe to get this right away, it's okay. We all have our own struggles and we all have to practice different habits, different strategies and different skills, and for some of us some of those things come easier than for others. So we all have our own challenges.
Give yourself the time you need, but what's most important here is for you to understand that there is a difference between just losing weight and seeing the number on the scale going going down versus losing true fat, retaining muscle, getting your hunger and energy up and getting those cravings under control.
Because when you take a hormonal weight loss approach, it feels so much different than a typical diet. It feels easier and you definitely won't believe how much better you'll feel when you take this kind of approach.
So listen, if you need more help or you want more information on hormonal weight loss I share more information about this in my one hour free class, which is called the 5 Steps To Lasting Weight Loss.
That free class goes into more detail about these hormones and I give you some more helpful tips in there for lasting weight-loss for women over 35.
I'll put the link in the show notes so you can go check that out. I hope that it helps you and if you love this episode, please leave it a 5-star rating and share it out with others.
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