Full Transcript for 261| Simple Fat Loss Foundations for Moms

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,