Ready for permanent weight loss? Have you tried a million times but never succeeded? In this episode we talk about how most of us go about behavior change in the wrong way and why it leads to failure. Then we dive into a step by step process for how you can changes that will lead to effective fat loss but will also be EASY to maintain for the rest of your life!
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The problem: So many people tell me: I don’t know where to start! Or, there’s so much information, how do I know what’s right? Or, I do ok at breakfast but I always blow it after dinner. There’s a common problem with all of these questions, concerns & challenges. YOU ARE TRYING TO DO TOO MUCH.
The Solution: Go back to the 80/20 rule (episode linked below) and identify what few activities produce the greatest results for you. An easy way to do this, which we talk about in detail in this episode, is to complete a SWOT analysis. Look at what has the potential to really hold you back and then target activities that can help you to avoid or overcome these challenges.
Practical Implemention:
Complete a SWOT analysis
Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities & threats as they relate to your ability to improve your nutrition choices & change your lifestyle to reach your fat loss goals.
Identify what weaknesses and threats could hold you back the most
Identify ONE small change you can make to help you overcome that most significant threat or weakness
Practice it until it becomes effortless. When you fail, keep trying. When you mess up, don’t quit.
Once it is effortless and habitual, go back to your SWOT analysis. What are you current weaknesses & threats? How can you minimize their ability to throw you off course? Identify another ONE thing.
This episode is all about estrogen. Estrogen dominance accelerates weight gain and makes weight loss an uphill battle. We unknowingly feed our estrogen dominance with our diet and lifestyle choices. In this episode we talk about how estrogen becomes a weight loss nightmare for both men and women and we establish concrete steps for reducing your overall estrogen levels, eliminating estrogen dominance, and improving your overall health and weight loss potential naturally.
When I weighed over 300 pounds my estrogen levels were nuts. I didn’t have a regular menstrual cycle for YEARS. I had polycystic ovarian syndrome or PCOS. Doctors told me my fertility was basically a joke. I had more than 20 cysts in each ovary. I think it might have been more than 30. My elevated estrogen levels were making it incredibly hard to lose weight. But then I did my research. Like other hormones, estrogen levels can be VASTLY improved through diet and lifestyle. So I did that. I shocked my doctors. I now have ZERO cysts in either ovary. My menstrual cycles are like clockwork. It’s unreal. And THAT is why I get so fired up about this.
The Challenge: Estrogen is a serious problem for many overweight and obese people – men and women! While it is considered a female sex hormone, it influences many other areas of health including heart health, bone density, mood and body fat distribution. We’re talking about a LOT more than fertility when we talk about estrogen. Imbalances in estrogen can lead to obesity, reproductive cancers, heart disease, infertility, PCOS, endometriosis and more. Fortunately, like I said, there is much we can do to balance estrogen naturally. Much of it is within our control based on our diet and lifestyle choices.
Estrogen dominance is a vicious cycle for those looking to lose weight. Excess estrogen encourages fat storage and insulin resistance, leading to weight gain. The more weight you gain, the more estrogen you produce, the more fat you store. Proper estrogen balance is an absolutely critical component of sustainable fat loss for women (and often for men, too!)
While the ovaries are primarily responsible for producing and releasing estrogen, your fat cells also produce estrogen. The more body fat you have, the most estrogen you produce. This is why we tend to see a LOT of problems with estrogen balance in overweight people. The more weight they put on, the more estrogen they are pumping into their bodies – male or female!!
The Solution: In order to maintain balanced estrogen levels, you not only have to produce the right amounts of estrogen in the correct ratios, but you have to be able to metabolize and excrete it. Your liver is responsible for estrogen metabolism – breaking it down and excreting it from the body. If that process is broken or impaired, excess estrogen will build up in your system. So, what does this mean? Our liver health is a really important part of our hormone balance! Once again, the foods we eat have a major impact on our liver health.
Our estrogen levels are a function not only of the estrogen we produce in our bodies but by the estrogen we consume! We are constantly increasing our estrogen load through toxins, herbicides and pesticides. We can work to control our estrogen production by eating cruciferous vegetables (natural estrogen detoxifiers) and balancing our blood sugar (avoiding processed foods, wheat, and grains). We can avoid consuming toxins in many, many ways.
Practical Implementation:
Limit your consumption of estrogens by avoiding environmental estrogens.
Choose organic foods
Opt for hormone-free dairy/meat/proteins
Wear gloves when handling cleaning products
Get a water filter, especially for your shower! (Link below in resources section)
Do not eat or drink out of plastic containers. At a minimum, DO NOT HEAT food or drinks in plastic containers!
Eat more cruciferous veggies! They are natural estrogen detoxifiers! More on cruciferous veggies in resources below.
Avoid soy products
Limit stress! Excessive stress will instruct your body to use precious progesterone to produce more of the stress hormone cortisol. When we lower our progesterone levels that way, we can create estrogen dominance without directly impacting our estrogen levels.
The thyroid hormones tend to get the most attention from the general public when it comes to weight loss. You hear people say all the time that they struggle with their weight because they have a “slow thyroid” or something to that effect. There is no doubt that the thyroid hormones play a major role in both weight loss and weight gain. They are significantly impacted by insulin, cortisol, leptin and the other metabolic hormones. Fortunately for most of us, there are ways to improve thyroid function naturally via the foods we eat and our lifestyle choices. Before we dive into what we can do, let’s establish a basic understanding of our thyroid hormones.
There are several thyroid hormones and they all function differently. They are produced and released based on signals the thyroid receives from the brain. Your thyroid is extremely sensitive to external inputs such as diet, environment, stress and toxins. Suboptimal diet and lifestyle choices can wreak havoc on your thyroid. If you take away one thing from this post, let it be that last sentence. Your diet and lifestyle have a MAJOR impact on your thyroid hormones. If you want optimal thyroid function, you need to eat and live accordingly!
Let’s talk about several thyroid hormones and how they are different from one another. First up is T3. T3 is the hormone we’re typically referring to when we think about metabolism. It is an active hormone that regulates your body’s fuel usage and temperature. T4 is the precursor to T3. In order to be impactful, T4 must first be successfully converted. Reverse T3 is a completely inactive thyroid hormone. All three of these hormones need to be successfully produced and they need to be produced in the proper ratios. If the overall amounts or the ratios or off, your thyroid function will be impaired.
Producing these hormones in adequate amounts and proper ratios is not all that is required for your thyroid to function optimally. The hormones must be successfully released from the cell and they must successfully attach to the precise receptor on the cell it is targeting. All those factors must be in place or else you’ll impair thyroid function.
Remember that your body is designed for survival. When you drastically reduce your calorie intake, your thyroid function slows down, taking your metabolism with it. Why? Because your body senses that fuel intake is limited and it doesn’t want to allow you to burn off your stored energy in case you need it. When you slash your calorie intake, your thyroid hormone production is reduced and much of the thyroid hormone you will produce and release will be the inactive form. This is your body’s way of conserving energy in times of perceived threat.
Similarly, when your leptin levels are low or you are resistant to leptin (due to being overweight or obese or consuming a very high carbohydrate diet), your thyroid function will decrease. Again, your body is either not getting signaled, or cannot properly receive the signal, that there is adequate stored energy in your body so it opts to downshift your metabolism to keep you “safe”.
High levels of estrogen can also slow your overall thyroid function. The presence of excess estrogen increases certain proteins that bind to your thyroid hormones and render them inactive. The thyroid is producing the hormones you need but they aren’t able to do their job because their receptor has been taken.
Finally, cortisol impacts your thyroid function. This relationship is a little more complicated. You’ll remember that in small, intermittent doses, cortisol is a significant fat loss ally. In these small, intermittent doses, cortisol can make your thyroid more efficient. Unfotunately, as is more often the case, excess cortisol inhibits the conversion of T4 (your inactive thyroid hormone) to T3, the active form. Why would we have excess cortisol? Chronic stress. Let it goooooo.
As you can see, there is a lot that can go wrong and impair thyroid function, leading to a slower, less efficient metabolism and an impaired ability to burn fat. Fortunately, there is a lot we can do to support the thyroid through diet, lifestyle and exercise.
First of all, proper thyroid function relies on several key nutrients. Here’s the thing – these nutrients MUST be consumed daily because our bodies have no ability to store them. Which nutrients am I talking about? Specifically iodine, zinc and selenium. If you aren’t sure if you are getting enough of these, your best bet is to take a high quality multivitamin. Nutrition is critical for optimal thyroid function.
As has been the case with all the hormones we’ve talked about so far, one of the most impactful changes we can make to maintain metabolic hormone balance is to control our blood sugar. Avoid dramatic peaks and valleys. The most straightforward and effective way to do this is to cut out processed foods and limit wheat and grain products. In fact, avoiding them completely is the ideal. Start by cutting out processed foods and focusing on vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, nuts, seeds and some fruit. However, as you make this transition be sure you aren’t drastically cutting your calories. Remember that dropping your calories slows your thyroid function. Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full.
Finally, lifting heavy weights and high intensity interval type training improves thyroid function by increasing the sensitivity of the cellular receptors to which your thyroid hormones need to attach to function.
I hope you’re beginning to see a trend as it relates to balancing and optimizing your metabolic hormones. They all work differently but they all impact each other. Not only that, they all benefit significantly from a healthy diet that minimizes the blood sugar spikes that result from processed foods, wheat and grain products.
If you want to know more about hormones and fat loss, check out my free podcast!
There’s also my new ebook! 50 pages of information and specific diet & lifestyle strategies to help you naturally balance your hormones and get into fat burning mode!
Carbs aren’t evil. But the way we eat them might be making us fat. In this episode we talk about how carbs have the potential to make us fat. We get into carbohydrate spillover, or the conditions under which carbs are actually converted to fat and stored as body fat. Fortunately, we talk about how to avoid that! We talk about how you can enjoy carbs without having them contribute to weight gain!
The Challenge: The Standard American Diet is rich in carbohydrates – almost every single meal and snack is dominated by carbs. The building block of ALL carbohydrates is simple sugar. When we break down these carbs they have the ability to raise our blood sugar and our insulin. This keeps us out of fat burning mode. Because we consume carbohydrates ALL the time, we encounter something called carbohydrate spillover – we don’t need these carbs for energy, there is no short term storage space available and so they are turned into fat and stored as such. In this episode we talk about what causes carbohydrate spillover and how we can avoid it while still enjoying carbohydrates!
We talked about how carbohydrates are chains of sugar of varying lengths and sizes, right? Straight chains, branched chains, all chains of sugar molecules – glucose, fructose – tiny little sugars. Well, it makes sense that when we metabolize these carbs they break back down into their little building blocks. Enroute to storage, this sugar enters the blood stream. The hormone insulin is released when sugar enters the blood and insulin is the USHER that takes the sugar to be stored. Now, if sugar hits your blood stream because you just drank a Gatorade during your 26 mile marathon, that sugar is probably going to be used immediately for energy, but for the rest of us, we’re probably not mid-workout or being chased by a tiger so that sugar needs to be stored. Insulin has a few drop off options for the sugar. The first place its going to try to take it is to the muscle. Storage space there is limited, but its easily accessible for your next workout or the next time you get chased by a bear. So, if you’re eating carbs regularly and not exercising regularly to tap into that fuel, chances are that the storage space in the muscles is all full. Next stop? The liver. Again, easy access in case your body needs to generate fuel but limited storage. And I’m talking seriously limited. About 400g between the muscle storage and liver storage combined. And that is not per day. That’s TOTAL capacity. Like I said, if you’re not working out regularly or your eating carbs on a regular basis, chances are that both of those storage sites are FULL. No vacancy. But insulin has another storage option. And this is what we call “carbohydrate spillover” – its also called lipogenesis, meaning essentially, creating fat. And this is where most of us live after every carb rich meal…
The excess glucose is converted to fat. That fat either continues to circulate in your blood (this is where we see things like elevated triglycerides) or it is stored in your adipose tissue – aka body fat. And, lucky us, this storage space is UNLIMITED and it is NOT easily accessed. Once it gets stored as body fat your body considers this its emergency fuel reserve and doesn’t give it up without a fight.
The Solution: We have to do the following: eat the right carbs at the right times in appropriate amounts. We need to get active so we can tap into our short term glycogen stores so that when we DO enjoy carbohydrates in the right amounts at the right times, they can replenish our muscle storage sites instead of initiating lipogenesis (fat creation) and being stored as body fat! This isn’t a complex process that will remove our enjoyment of food or require us to spend hours in the gym – it’s really simple once you understand how it works and how it can keep us in fat burning mode all the time!
Our control of our blood sugar and our insulin response is the primary determinant of our energy levels, our cravings, hunger, focus, mood and much more. Here’s the bottom line that you need to understand: your body cannot and will not burn fat when insulin is high.
Think about it – insulin is deployed when there is fuel that needs to be stored, right? There’s extra sugar (glucose) in the blood that needs to be taken away and stored. So insulin tells the body “hey, there’s plenty of fuel here, we are now in storage mode” – that message turns OFF any fat burning machinery. Why? Because burning fat generates extra energy for the body and insulin has signaled the body that there is already an excess of energy. No more is needed!
In order for your body to go into fat burning mode, there has to be two conditions:
The right hormonal environment
Less fuel available than your body needs to operate
Most people only focus on #2. They eat less and create hormonal chaos in the body without realizing that for your body to break down fat, the hormone glucagon MUST be in action. Glucagon kind of works as the opposite of insulin. Where insulin is deployed in response to excess fuel and facilitates storage, glucagon is deployed when there isn’t quite enough fuel and facilitates the breakdown of body fat to provide fuel for the body.
Practical Implementation: Eat the right carbs: Carbohydrates from whole food sources like berries, apples, citrus fruits, potatoes, sweet potatoes Avoid the wrong carbs: Wheat, grains, oats, processed foods & simple sugars Eat carbs at the right time: At your dinner time meal or post workout Eat them in the right amounts: Not to exceed 1/2 cup Pair them properly: Always have your carbohydrates with fat or protein (chicken, beef, fish, butter, avocado, etc) Take care of your short term storage to avoid having excess carbohydrate being converted to and stored as fat: This boils down to getting active. The most effective activity is going to be high intensity intervals, lifting heavy weights, or both. This doesn’t require hours in the gym. In fact, these workouts can usually be done in 20 minutes or less. We talk about how beginners can get started in the episode and one of my favorite links for workouts is below!
Resources: Looking for regular coaching, accountability and more tools and resources than you can imagine? Join me inside The Consistency Course.
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We have the power to turn on fat burning via our food choices. That’s pretty powerful stuff. What’s more powerful, in my opinion, is understanding how we’re constantly turning fat burning OFF via our food choices without even knowing it! There is one particular hormone, insulin, that loudly signals our body to turn off all fat burning processes. And many of us, especially those of us who are carrying extra weight, are allowing insulin to shout that message to our bodies allllll the time without knowing it! Today I want to explore how and why insulin sends that message and how we can eat to ensure that insulin does NOT send that message. Our control of our blood sugar and our insulin response is the primary determinant of our weight loss, energy levels, our cravings, hunger, focus, mood and much more. Here’s the bottom line that you need to understand: your body cannot and will not burn fat when insulin is high.
Remember that when we eat carbohydrates, they must be broken down into their smaller building blocks so that our bodies can use them for fuel. In the case of carbohydrates, these building blocks are sugars. To be used for fuel or to be stored, this sugar travels through the blood stream. Insulin is deployed in response to high blood sugar because it is the usher that helps take the sugar to its ultimate storage space. Think about it – insulin is deployed when there is fuel that needs to be stored, right? Those conditions make insulin signal the body, “hey, there’s plenty of fuel here, we are now in storage mode.” That message turns OFF any fat burning machinery. Why? Because burning fat generates extra energy for the body and insulin has signaled the body that there is already an excess of energy. No more is needed! Your body is efficient. The presence of insulin signals the body that there is EXTRA fuel. Your body won’t allow fat burning when there is extra fuel because that would be inefficient and it would flood you with extra energy that there wasn’t any use for. The presence of elevated insulin levels turns OFF fat burning machinery in your body. Get it?
In order to turn on fat burning in your body, two conditions must be met:
The right hormonal environment
Less fuel available than your body needs to operate
Most people only focus on #2. They eat less without regard to their hormonal balance. They don’t realize that the hormonal environment is what determines whether or not your body will allow fat burning. If you just create a caloric deficit by eating fewer calories, your body could respond by burning muscle and/or by slowing down your metabolism and signaling the body to hang on even tighter to your stored body fat! There’s another hormone that has to be in play for fat burning to be allowed. And guess what? That hormone, glucagon, can’t do its job if insulin is hanging around. Glucagon works opposite of insulin. Where insulin is deployed in response to excess fuel and facilitates storage, glucagon is deployed when there isn’t enough fuel and facilitates the breakdown of body fat to provide fuel for the body. Remember, since insulin signals the body that there is an excess of fuel, glucagon can’t break down fat under those conditions!
A lot of people will assume this means that we shouldn’t ever eat any carbs if we want to lose weight – that’s just not true – we just have to make sure that we’re eating the right carbs at the right times in the right amounts. So how do we do that? We’ll get there! In our next post we’re going to look a little more closely at insulin before we dive into specific strategies for how to turn on fat burning via the foods we eat.
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