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00:22 Fat loss can be confusing. You've got macros, you've got calories. Do you need cardio? Do you need to lift weights?
00:31 Should you be in a calorie deficit? Should you be doing body recomposition and eating at maintenance? It can be a lot.
00:39 So today, I want to give you three simple foundations for fat loss that have to be in place before anything else will work.
01:03 Welcome to the first episode of a two-part series that I'm really excited about. Today's episode is called Simple Fat Loss Foundations for Moms,
01:12 and the next episode will be about lifting. When I first started trying to lose fat, I thought it was going to be easy.
01:24 You put your calories in the app, you track, boom, two pounds a week for 10 weeks, and I'm done. I had it mapped out.
01:34 And I'm guessing a lot of you thought about it like that, too. And then real life happened, and the numbers stopped cooperating.
01:44 And I had zero idea what I was doing wrong. If that is you, by the end of this episode, you're going to understand what has to happen so that you can lose the fat that you want and feel good
02:01 looking at yourself in the mirror again. Most of the fat loss advice out there often sounds like you just need to be more in a deficit, you need to eat less, you need to move more, you need to eat lower calories, or you just need the perfect macro ratio, and that'll solve it.
02:20 Eat 1,200 calories, and here's a nap. Log everything, good luck. And that advice is not exactly wrong. It's just incomplete.
02:31 It gives you a number, but there's no one there to tell you why that number isn't working anymore.
02:46 So you follow the app, you do what it says. And at some point, it just stops working, the weight loss stalls, and the only answer is to eat even less.
03:07 I remember feeling like that, and feeling kind of like you're wasting your time. Is this even working? One of the women that I talked to recently, she said it really well.
03:19 She said, "I just want to know if what I'm doing is actually right and beneficial, so I'm not wasting my time."
03:26 Can we all just feel that? I hate wasting my time, and that is what today is about. I want to make sure you're not wasting your time, and the way we do that
03:37 is by getting these three foundations in place. Foundation number one is: you must be in a calorie deficit to lose fat.
03:48 This first foundation is the big overarching rule. To lose fat, you have got to be in a calorie deficit. That means your body has to burn more energy than you're giving it
04:01 with your food. I want you to think about your body, your body fat, kind of like a savings account. The food you eat is your paycheck coming into the account, and the calories you burn every day are like your monthly bills.
04:18 So you have the paycheck coming in, you have the bills going out, and your body is like the savings account.
04:26 Your body only pulls from savings when your paycheck doesn't cover the bills. If your paycheck covers everything, then your savings account just sits there.
04:38 So let's translate that. If your food intake covers everything, then your body fat just sits there. Does that make sense?
04:48 If there's extra money left over at the end of the month, it goes into savings. Okay, that's what your body does with body fat.
04:56 If it's getting everything that it needs from food, it has no reason to pull from your fat stores. And if you're giving it more than it needs, it adds to your fat stores.
05:08 Now, this sounds simple, but there are a lot of things that can influence this. For example, what happens if your bills shrink?
05:19 So, our bills don't usually shrink when we're talking about money, at least not normally. It's always exciting when they do.
05:28 But let's just say, for the sake of this metaphor, your bills got smaller. Maybe your rent went down.
05:36 Wouldn't that be nice?
06:22 So let's talk about what happens if your bills shrink. That can be, for example, your metabolism adapting downward because you've been in a calorie deficit, or something else is going on, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
07:35 If your metabolism adapts downward, that means your body is burning less than it used to. Then, with that smaller paycheck, because you were trying to create a calorie deficit, like if you are putting less in the bank, right, because you're trying to make it pull from savings,
07:55 then that smaller paycheck that you thought was creating a calorie deficit is suddenly covering all your bills with some left over for savings.
08:06 You're eating less, so you think you're in a deficit, but you actually aren't. And hormones can do this too. When your hormones are off, your metabolism can adapt down.
08:18 And you guessed it, you're not in a calorie deficit anymore. I had this experience recently, in the past year. For the past several years, I've tracked my calories through an app called Macro Factor, which is amazing.
08:39 It's an amazing app, the best food logging app I've ever used, because it can estimate with pretty reasonable certainty your energy expenditure, which is just
08:50 what your bills are, how much you're outputting. So, what I was able to see on there was my expenditure dropping. I was eating probably 1,500 to 1,600 calories.
09:06 I was getting 10,000 steps, I was lifting, and my daily expenditure started tanking. Now, at this time, I didn't realize it was because I was going to be diagnosed with Hashimoto's, which is a thyroid problem.
09:22 But my metabolism dropped down to about 1,300 calories a day. All that activity I was doing, the lifting, all the right things, 1,300 calories a day because of what was going on with my thyroid.
09:35 And I was also working through, and I'm still working through, a significant gut issue. So I was gaining weight because I was in a 200 to 300 calorie surplus.
09:51 Do you see what happened? My bills got smaller. So I had a lot more in savings because my input, my paycheck,
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was still the same.
10:04 Now, if I were to go to some doctor or whatever, the generic answer would be: well, you just have to create a calorie deficit.
10:16 So eat a thousand calories a day, just eat less. But that wasn't really the solution for me. I had to figure out what was going on with my metabolism, with my hormones.
10:26 I got testing, I got answers, I'm starting to work on the actual problem, my metabolism has recovered, and what I got as a result of that was so much better than just the scale moving because I knew what was going on in my body.
10:46 If I had just been like, well, I need to lose this weight and I can't gain weight, let me eat a thousand calories a day, I would have exacerbated the problem.
10:54 I would have put my body under more stress and it would have been worse. So, what I noticed through all that was that my tracking of my data could show me something was off.
11:10 It couldn't tell me how to fix it, but the deficit rule applied the entire time. My bills had changed. So, this is why it's really important for you to look at the whole picture, not just, oh my gosh, I'm gaining weight, I need to eat less.
11:35 The other thing I want to talk about with this is body recomposition. You may have heard about that. It's called recomp or body recomp, where people can eat at maintenance calories and still lose fat.
11:47 That happens when you are building muscle and your body pulls from your fat stores to help pay for that new muscle.
11:55 The thing I want you to understand is that the deficit rule still applies. The deficit is just coming from the muscle building.
12:03 Okay, that is eating up some of the savings, okay? Which brings me to the last piece of this foundation. Your food is the biggest lever you can pull for a calorie deficit.
12:18 Exercise is not going to be the biggest lever you pull. A lot of people struggle with this, a lot of women especially.
12:29 Cardio is for your heart. Lifting is for building muscle. The goal of exercise is not to burn calories. It can contribute, yes, but that is not the goal of it.
12:43 I used to think I just needed to run enough to burn off fat. I remember one time I went for a one-mile run and I had a Fitbit and it told me I burned 100 calories.
12:55 And I came home and I grabbed a chewy bar, which was 100 calories, and I ate that in like one minute.
13:02 And I remember thinking, man, I spent like 10 minutes running that mile and I ate all those calories back in probably 30 seconds.
13:14 That's how the exercise lever compares to the food. You're never going to be able to out-exercise your eating habits.
13:23 So, I want you to stop thinking of exercise as a method to burn calories. So, that was foundation number one: you must be in a calorie deficit.
13:34 Foundation number two: you need muscle to protect your metabolism. Remember when I talked about your bills shrinking? Well, a big part of your metabolism, a big part of those bills, is your muscle mass.
13:50 I want you
to think about muscle as the most expensive employee on your body's payroll. Muscle takes a lot of energy to maintain.
14:01 So when money gets tight, like when you're in a calorie deficit, your body starts looking for who it can fire.
14:10 And if you're not using your muscle, it can be fired, laid off. Your body will cut your muscle. This is why people who are on the GLP-1 medications like Wegovy, Ozempic, and Zepbound who aren't lifting are at risk of losing a lot of muscle, because they are in a big calorie deficit.
14:34 And if they're not using that muscle, your body has no reason to keep it. Less muscle means you have smaller bills, which means you have to eat less just to maintain your weight.
14:47 Lifting weights is how you tell your body, hey, we need this employee over here. Do not fire her. You lift to build the muscle, and that muscle protects your metabolism.
15:01 I'm going to go into a lot more detail on this in the next episode, but for today, I want you to know that muscle mass is a non-negotiable if you don't want to be eating 800 calories a day just to maintain your weight loss.
15:15 That is especially true if you are a shorter woman. I am only 5'2". I need every single pound of muscle that I have because my metabolism naturally is slower, I want to say slower, but it's smaller than a 5'6" or 5'8" woman.
15:35 I am physically a smaller human because I'm only 5'2". So if you are short, I really want you to hear this.
15:44 You have got to have muscle if you don't want to eat 800 calories a day.
16:13 I'm looking for moms who know they need to eat better, they know they need to get stronger, but they can't seem to stick with it long enough to see results.
16:23 If that's you, I want to tell you about my Fat Loss Formula for Moms program. It's 12 weeks of one-to-one coaching with me.
16:31 This is personalized one-on-one coaching, not an app that gives you a number and leaves you on your own. I build your workouts around your equipment and your schedule.
16:40 I help you set up your nutrition so it works with your kids and your life. And I check in with you twice a week.
16:48 You don't need more information, you need someone excited, expecting you to show up. That's what I'm here for. Book a free discovery call on my website at effectivefitnessforwomen.com or click the link in the show notes.
17:01 I'd love to chat with you. Okay, foundation number three: you need to protect your muscle. We've covered the calorie deficit and we've covered
17:15 the fact that you need muscle to protect your metabolism. So let's talk about the thing that protects your muscle. We're going to connect this chain here.
17:27 We need a calorie deficit, which means we need a healthy metabolism, which means we need muscle, which means we need protein to feed that muscle.
17:36 If lifting is how you tell your body to keep that expensive muscle employee, protein is her paycheck.
17:47 Without it, she cannot stay. For me, protein and calories are the top two things that I focus on with my clients.
17:56 The other macros, fats and carbs, I like to make more individualized based on your preferences. They can make a difference in your training and how you feel.
18:05 But if you're new to this and building your foundation, like we're talking about today, I just want you to focus on calories and protein.
18:14 I like to start my clients with a goal of 100 grams of protein a day. But if that feels like a lot because you tracked and you're only getting 50 grams of protein a day, then maybe start at 80%.
18:28 Start where you are and build from there. You need that protein every day to protect your muscle, and it also helps you feel full.
18:37 Most of my clients tell me that when they start eating more protein, they don't deal with hunger nearly as much.
18:44 And if 100 grams of protein feels like a lot, I have a free resource for you. It's called my 100 Gram Protein Cheat Sheet.
18:54 This is an easy mix-and-match guide of real foods, so you can hit 100 grams of protein a day.
19:00 You can grab it, the link is in the show notes. Okay, let's put this all together. Protein protects your muscle, muscle protects your metabolism,
19:15 and your metabolism protects your calorie deficit. If one link in that chain is missing, then the rest of them are not going to be optimized.
19:26 Your action item for this week is: I want you to pick one link to work on. For most of you, the simplest place to start is going to be protein.
19:35 So grab that protein cheat sheet and start there. Next episode, I'm going to talk about simple strength training foundations for moms, and that is where I'm going to share how to lift so your body actually keeps the muscle.
19:49 You don't want to miss it. And if you want someone to help you put all three of these foundations in place, book a free discovery call on my website, effectivefitnessforwomen.com, or click the link in the show notes.
20:01 I'll talk to you next time on the Effective Weight Loss for Moms podcast.