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There are 2 things that are SUPER important as we get started towards your sustainable fat loss lifestyle:
Learning how to pay attention to what works best for YOUR body
Implementing the most effective strategies (and not wasting time with ineffective ones!)
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I was a chronic dieter. I believed that the only way to fat loss was restriction, deprivation and misery. And every time I endured the misery, I’d lose some weight and inevitably pile it back on. I never imagined that I could do the work, maintain my results and never battle hunger & cravings. I lost 140 lbs without being perfect, without being miserable and without ever “dieting”. Here’s my story!
But don’t just look at my own success! Check out these cool Primal Potential Success stories! I’ll be adding more soon!
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The first and most important thing you can do is start paying attention to your body. Those sensations you feel all day every day like hunger, cravings, low energy & mood swings? Those are messages from your hormones! Start tracking what you eat, how much & when as well as your hormonal biofeedback. This will be a treasure trove of information for you as you navigate the fat loss process! Here’s a super detailed post I wrote on how to track and how to learn from your tracking document.
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[av_textblock ] LEARN THE FAT LOSS BASICS
Have you checked out the free Fat Loss Basics mini series on the Primal Potential podcast? You’ve got to! It’s a great starting point for understanding the most essential, high-impact elements required for fat loss. The show notes pages give you additional resources, but download the full episodes and listen to them one at a time!
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[av_textblock ] PRACTICE HABIT BUILDING
We don’t recommend diving in head first. That’s a diet. Always evaluate whether or not the strategies you’re implementing are short term or long term. Short term strategies deliver short term results. If you can’t do it forever, don’t waste your time or energy doing it for a day. Identify one, sustainable practice and begin implementing it every day. Keep practice both when it’s easy and when it’s not and don’t add more until your first strategy feels effortless.
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I want to give you the tools you need to crush your goals. I want to help you stop struggling & get results without wasting your time, money or energy. To that end, I’ve got some free tools for you to download!
Just last night someone asked me why I drink almond milk instead of cow’s milk. I am regularly asked, “Is dairy healthy” or “Is dairy paleo/primal?” and, “Can I eat dairy and still lose weight?” They are complicated questions but totally worth getting into. A few points I want to make right out of the gate: the only person who can tell you if dairy is right for you is YOU. Everyone will have a different tolerance to dairy. The best way to identify your own tolerance is via an elimination test. Basically, cut out all dairy for a couple weeks. Pay attention to how you feel. How does it impact your energy levels? How does it impact your digestion? Are you less bloated? How is your bowel regularity? Have you noticed any changes in your skin? How about your hunger? Your cravings? Your focus and attention? After a couple weeks, slowly add it back in, one form at a time. Continue to pay close attention. Any changes in your skin health? Your energy, hunger, mood, attention, bowel movements, etc? This is how we make decisions about our bodies. By paying attention.
Beyond that, there are definitely poor, good, better and best ways to approach dairy. Some types of dairy products are bad news regardless of whether your goals are fat loss or health. They are just bad news. From there, there’s a spectrum. We’ll get into that spectrum and how you can make the best choices possible if you choose to eat dairy.
Can we start with the basics? What’s the point of milk? Mammals (humans included) produce milk as a means to nourish and accelerate the growth of their young. Milk is a means of bypassing essential hormones, nutrients and antibodies to the baby it was intended to nurture. Milk is filtered blood. Humans are the only mammal that drink the milk of another mammal. Human milk is rich in antibodies, hormones, vitamins and minerals intended to help baby humans thrive. Cow’s milk is rich in antibodies, hormones, vitamins and minerals intended to help a baby cow thrive. There is no magic nutrient in cow’s milk that makes it essential for humans. The vitamins & minerals can be obtained from meats, fruits and vegetables. The hormones and antibodies? I’m gonna go ahead and hold my opinion that we don’t need bovine estrogens, bovine growth hormones and bovine antibodies in our systems. Just a hunch.
But we have to consider reality. Our food supply is vastly different from what it used to be. The milk most of us drink or feed to our children didn’t come from ‘ol Bessie, grazing in a field in the back yard that Pa went out and collected and carried in to the house. Nope, that’s not happening (in most cases) and we have to take a good, long look at how the cows who produce the milk are raised, what they are fed, what they are supplemented with and the processing that takes place afterwards. Those factors all make a really big difference in the dairy products many Americans consume on a regular basis. Here are some of the factors we need to take into consideration when evaluating whether or not conventional dairy products are right for us:
What are the cows being fed?
What herbicides and pesticides are in their feed?
How does their feed impact their hormone production?
What hormones are they being treated with?
What does the processing of the dairy product do to the nutritive value?
What else is being added and how does that impact my body? (Stabilizers, sweeteners, colorings, etc)
So we know that when we buy a gallon milk from SuperMart this isn’t milk carried in via a stainless steel bucket from Sweet Bessie grazing in the grass. This is milk from a factory-farmed animal. These farms are a business and they make more money when the animals produce more milk. So, they are treated with hormones to accelerate their milk production. These are extra hormones that do pass through to their milk. This hormone treatment also accelerates the animals own hormone production so you can think of it as a double whammy. Convention milk is known to be rich in bovine estrogens, testosterone, insulin, growth hormones, progesterone and much more.
These animals are also pumped full of antibiotics to keep them healthier and more productive. You’d better believe that these antibiotics are transferred into their milk. These conventionally raised cows are not allowed to graze freely and eat a grass-rich diet. Nope, they are fed the cheapest food available. Grains and corn. What would happen to a human’s hormone production if eating a diet of corn, grains, hormones and antibiotics? They’d produce way more insulin & stress hormones. This same thing happens to the animals. That is passed through their milk. Beyond that, the feed is often loaded with herbicides, pesticides and run off feces. Yeah….I don’t need to say much more about that.
You might be thinking, “C’mon Elizabeth. For those things to impact my health they have to survive the processing of the product, they have to survive digestion in my body and then they have to be metabolized and absorbed into my body. That’s so unlikely.” Well, if we weren’t talking about milk, you’d be right. But here’s the thing. We have to go back to what milk is intended for. It is intended to pass along these hormones, antibodies and nutrients to our offspring. So, milk naturally contains protease inhibitors (inhibitors of the enzymes that naturally break down proteins like hormones & antibodies) so that they do in fact survive the harsh conditions of metabolism and so that they can in fact be digested and absorbed. Beyond that, the Standard American Diet is full of digestive irritants (such as gluten and phytates) that compromise our intestinal permeability. What does that mean? The Standard American Diet makes it so the barriers of our intestinal walls don’t protect us as well as they should so stuff that shouldn’t get in is much more likely to. In fact, milk itself contains two major dietary irritants (lactose & casein) that can exacerbate this intestinal permeability. For me personally, I don’t want to take the risk. I can get the vitamins & minerals from other foods without the bovine hormones, pesticides, herbicides and who knows what else.
Then there is the processing of the milk products – things like pasteurization and homogenization. This is a whole other post but I’ll address it briefly by saying that yes, these processes do reduce the amount of potentially harmful bacteria in the dairy product, but along the way they also strip the milk of essential vitamins and other nutrients while modifying the structure of the fats making them oxidized and highly reactive (read: unstable and at high risk of impairing our health and causing inflammation in humans).
Unfortunately, finding high quality dairy products is kind of hard. If you live near a local farm or farmer’s market where you can find dairy products from organic farms with grass-fed, hormone free animals – that’s a fantastic start. You always want to look for dairy products that are hormone free (often labeled as rbgh free, which stands for recombinant bovine growth hormone). You want the product to be from grass fed animals and you get bonus points if the product is pesticide free. The buzz words you want to look for include:
Organic
Grass-fed
Raw
Hormone free (rbgh or rbst free)
Antibiotic free
Pesticide free
If you feel overwhelmed by that list I’d ask yourself: is it worth it? Are you missing out on that much by avoiding it?
I won’t be a hypocrite: I do put cream in my coffee on occasion but there is a cream I buy at Whole Foods that is organic & hormone free from grass fed cows. When I make my own ice cream I use this cream. Do I sometimes have Ben & Jerry’s? I do. Do I sometimes have Cold Stone? I do. But certainly not on the regular because, for me, the risks do not outweigh the rewards.
A few more things to consider:
If you choose to eat dairy, choose whole fat dairy. Low fat and fat free options are highly processed and often have added sugars.
Limit your consumption of dairy products with added sugars or flavors. These are highly processed foods and the more we can stick to nature, the better.
Hard, fermented cheeses are on the “better” spectrum because they are less allergenic due to the healthy bacteria eating up all the lactose during the fermentation process
Consider an elimination test to see how you feel without dairy.
Eat a diet rich in veggies to get plenty of calcium
As I started this little post I mentioned that there is no hard and fast answer. Your body can tell you what is right for you. Your gut can tell you what is right for you. See how you respond with and without dairy. If you do choose to eat dairy, I encourage you to make choices along the “better” end of the spectrum, seeking out hormone free, grass fed, organic options. Make convention dairy products the exception, not the rule.
I did an entire podcast episode on dairy. Did you catch it? Listen to it here: http://bit.ly/1xmBFD7
Should you be gluten free? What is gluten and how does it impact health, weight loss and fat loss? What foods contain gluten and how can you go about removing gluten from your diet? It is even possible? What risks does gluten pose to health & weight loss and what we should do about it? If you’re wondering about all the hype and if you should be gluten free, this is the episode to listen to!
Gluten is a major hot button in the nutrition & fitness world of late. It seems like most people are wondering if they should eliminate gluten or not and the grocery aisle of gluten-free products is growing by the second! Many people feel like they’re doing a “healthy” thing when they buy gluten free cookies or brownies. But what is gluten and who needs to be concerned about it? Is there a benefit to removing it? What do we risk if we don’t? Are gluten-free treats healthy? We’re going to cover all of that in today’s episode.
I want to emphasize that I am just sharing information with you. I’m not telling you that you should or shouldn’t cut gluten out of your diet. That is a personal decision and it should be based on your body and your goals. It should not be based on other people’s opinions – mine included. Instead, it should be based on how your body feels and reacts when you’re eating gluten vs. when you’re not. That is the only factor that matters. How your body works. That’s it.
You might be wondering why it seems like gluten is “all of a sudden” a problem. Well, it’s really just about how much more gluten we’ve been exposed to over the last 20 or so years with the advent and over-exposure to processed foods. Gluten is in almost all processed foods and those are a staple in the standard American diet. It didn’t use to be that way. Plus, grains (which contain gluten) have really changed. That’s why we’re seeing an estimated 400% increase in the presence of celiac disease just in the last decade or so! Our exposure is through the roof!
In this episode we talk about many issues that can be caused by gluten consumption. One of the big ones is inflammation. We’ve talked about inflammation before and how inflammation generates damage within the body. Inflammation diverts our body’s resources to go respond to the damage. When we eat anything that is proinflammatory, we’re repeating the damage each time we put the fork to our mouth. It’s kinda like getting punched in the face. Once is pretty bad, right? The healing process begins. But what if multiple times each day you’re getting punched in the face? Not only will the damage never heal, but what could have been a minor problem is now creating a major problem because you keep taking hits. The scary part is that unlike getting punched in the face, you might not initially feel this inflammation in your body. Someone who has celiac disease will consume gluten and have an immediate reaction. They stop eating it, of course. For those of us who aren’t celiac or who aren’t tuned in to the inflammatory reactions in our body or it’s not severe enough to notice, we just keep re-introducing the damage multiple, sometimes dozens of times each day – where will we be 10 years from now? What is happening internally as a result of inflammation that we just can’t feel yet? Remember that inflammation is the starting point for just about every disease we know of.
The Solution:
When we consider the question – should you be gluten free – there’s two factors at play here: health & fat loss. Both are very important, of course, because the healthier you are, the easier fat loss becomes. But that’s not to say that you can’t achieve fat loss while eating some foods that are on the “unhealthy” end of the spectrum. Gluten is not a healthy food. It’s just not. But, you know I’m not a fan of going “all in” to behavior change because I think it’s not sustainable. You must determine whether or not gluten is right for your body. In this episode we talk in detail about how you can make that determination.
Practical Implementation:
Gluten containing foods raise your blood sugar and therefore elicit an insulin response and will impair fat burning. If you are minimizing gluten-containing foods and seeing fat loss results, bravo. Keep doing what you’re doing. Eventually, as your body becomes less responsive, I’d encourage you to work towards eliminating gluten all together as a means of seeing further progress.
Are you curious to know if you’re sensitive to gluten? The best way to find out is to commit to eliminating all gluten from your diet for 7-10 days and see how your body responds. After 7-10 days, begin to re-introduce it slowly and note changes in your mood, energy, water retention, joint comfort, skin health, mental clarity and stomach comfort.
Symptoms that a lot of people experience when they consume gluten can include bloating, fatigue, skin problems or rashes, bowel irregularities like constipation, gas or diarrhea, depression & mood swings.
I feel strongly that whether or not you think you have a sensitivity, there is merit to removing all gluten from your diet for a week or two and paying attention to how you feel. If you feel AMAZING and better than you have in a while, continue to eliminate it. Does it accelerate your progress towards your fat loss goals? Are you less hungry? Are you experiencing fewer cravings? Let that be the indicator of whether or not gluten has a place in your diet.
Check out the list below of common gluten-containing foods. It is pretty extensive. The most straight forward way to eliminate gluten is to eliminate wheat and wheat products. The easiest way to do that? Move away from processed foods. That’s not a 100% rule, but it will make a MASSIVE difference in your consumption and exposure.
There’s a reason you aren’t getting the weight loss or fat loss results you want. You’re doing the wrong things and you’re wasting your time, energy and effort. There’s a better way. This episode talks about how you can spend less time, energy, effort and money while generating significantly more results and, most importantly, getting results that will last.
Join the Lean Potential Fat Loss Mastermind group before March 27th & get lifetime access to the fat loss habit implementation program (nutrition, mindset & fitness) for just $397. After that, the price goes back up to $597. You gotta use the coupon code LaunchWeek. This course walks you through implementing the most effective fat loss habits and working with Elizabeth and Keri to find the most impactful ways to make them work for YOU. We are taking into account your body, your metabolism, your lifestyle, your preferences and your activity level. This course is focused on RESULTS. Information means nothing without action and Elizabeth and Keri will help you to troubleshoot, stay accountable and get sustainable results. You’ll get weekly challenges, discussion questions, constant encouragement as well as meal ideas, workouts and recipes! Don’t pass up this opportunity to get results and permanently get out of the dieting cycle!
If you want to know more, if you have questions or if you want to hang out with Elizabeth & Keri, register for our free webinar Sunday, March 22nd at 8pm EST. Here’s the link to register: http://bit.ly/1b97J8P
Many of you found my last WIAW post helpful so I thought I’d do another one. Do you guys enjoy these? Would you like to see more of them on the blog? Lemme know! You know I kinda like you guys and want to give you what you want!
Breakfast was modified bulletproof coffee. Now, let me be clear that there is NOTHING “magical” about bulletproof coffee. It is not the magic fat loss bullet. If you love it, if it satisfies your hunger & increases your energy while moving you towards your fat loss goals – go for it. I happen to really love it because it’s tasty and keeps my hunger at bay for many hours. But you can have fantastic fat loss results with chia seed pudding, bacon & eggs, frittatas, etc. This is just a breakfast that really works for me. I did an entire podcast episode on bulletproof coffee so be sure to check that out if you wanna know more. In this cup: Kicking Horse coffee blended with MCT oil, Kerrygold grass fed butter, 1 raw egg yolk and a tablespoon of raw cacao. I find that it is easiest to blend with an immersion blender to avoid having to temper the glass blender with hot water.
Around lunch time I was craving brussels sprouts but didn’t have any leftover meat so I decided to throw in a couple eggs and a slice of bacon. I chopped up a bag of brussels sprouts and sauteed them in the bacon fat before added three eggs. I stir around the yolk (without breaking it) so that the whites cook but the yolk stays a little runny. You could easily just mix it all up like a stir-fry to make it a bit easier/faster.
I felt the need to snack mid-afternoon so I had a small handful (about 10) macadamia nuts. Gotta be careful with nuts because I can easily overdo it and mindlessly munch for 20-30 minutes. No bueno. I portion out a serving and move right along.
Dinner was the all-star meal. I made Everyday Paleo’s chili verde and served it over mashed cauliflower. The chili was a bit time intensive (more than usual for me) but it will easily make enough for several meals and I love that. Leftovers are key! To mash my cauli I just steam up the florets from 1-2 heads and when they are tender enough to be split with a fork I drain the water, add a couple tbsp of butter and blend with my immersion blender. Add a bit of salt and voila! So yum.
I didn’t eat anything after dinner because I was totally satisfied but I did enjoy a cup of blood orange tea with unsweetened almond milk. Sometimes I want something sweet or creamy after dinner but I know my body doesn’t need more food. Tea is a pretty standard go-to for me.
I really want to emphasize that eating for fat loss SHOULD NOT mean being hungry all the time or eating foods you don’t love. I always choose foods I really enjoy and look forward to eating. I don’t spend hours in the kitchen and I rarely experience hunger. Focus on finding whole foods you love and really be mindful and present during your meals.
