#52: How to Lose Fat Without Exercising More
[00:00:00] Welcome to 40 Plus Fitness for Women. I'm Lynn your host, and I am a certified menopause fitness coach, helping women to get started weight training and to take care of their health in perimenopause and beyond.
So today's episode is building on last week's episode where we talked about why it isn't actually a very useful strategy to try to earn your food. In other words, to try to burn enough calories so that you can eat. And today we're talking about what to do instead.
but before we get started, I wanted to say that, you know, my main focus is not really to be like a weight loss coach, right? I am trying to get women to start weight training because it is such a neglected. Part of our fitness, we should be making sure our muscles are in good shape and also paying attention to our [00:01:00] cardio health.
And I would say that most of the women who are doing some kind of exercise who are in their forties, fifties, and sixties, are paying attention to cardio. They're running, they're, you know, doing the marathon challenge, going to group fitness classes and all that. And they're not really training their muscles.
At the same time, I recognize that a lot of women struggle with their weight, especially in midlife. It seems to pile on and there are a lot of reasons for that. And I do think that there is a place for learning some good weight management habits. And I know myself, when I last spring, did a fat loss, uh, phase.
I actually learned a lot of things about how I was eating and found things that I could tweak and picked up new habits that have really served me, and allowed me to maintain [00:02:00] this lower body fat level. So that's what I'm hoping to be able to educate women on.
Anyway. So with that, let's hop into our topic today.
So I guess the broader subject that we're talking about today is losing fat or losing weight by being in a calorie deficit. And that is a true thing, okay? If you go into a calorie deficit, then you should be losing weight. And if you are not losing weight, then you are most likely not in a calorie deficit.
Now a calorie deficit means that you are eating fewer calories than what your body is burning. And last week what we talked about was the phenomenon where women are working out to burn calories. [00:03:00] They're looking at what their sports watch is telling them or what the treadmill is telling them, and they're taking that number and thinking that, okay, now I can eat that many calories if I wanna maintain my weight, or I eat less than that many calories if I wanna lose weight. And though that makes logical sense, right? To do it that way, it doesn't work. The trackers that your user using are not accurate. They are over reporting the number of calories you are burning. So you think you're using up more calories than you actually are, and if you base your eating on that, you are gonna be over eating. So your trackers, the treadmill, all those things, they're not telling you the truth.
You can go back and listen to last week's episode for more information.
So now let's look at what you could be doing instead.
So a far more useful way to approach this is to figure [00:04:00] out what is the amount of calories that you should eat in order to keep your weight steady. So-called maintenance mode. So there are two ways you can figure out what your maintenance level calories are. The first is to use a calculator, and now there are calculators all over the place online. You can Google calculate maintenance calories and you'll find a whole. Bunch of them.
Now, these calculators, I would. Use maybe two or three of them and see what numbers they come up with. 'cause they're not all exactly the same. But they will ask you things like, and they should ask you these things if they're not asking you these things, then. You know, choose a different calculator, but they should ask you about your daily activity level. So they'll ask like, about your job, is it sedentary? You know, are you moving a lot? So that is [00:05:00] assessing in a way how many calories you are using from your non-exercise activity. Right, just you're moving during the day.
So if you're like me and you're basically sitting at a desk, then you choose the sedentary, and then let's say you're a doctor and you're, you know, walking around the hospital all day doing the rounds, then it'll be a little bit higher. Um, now my. Tip is that if you're kind of between two levels, try the calculator with the lower level and then with the higher level, and maybe write both those numbers down.
Um. And then you'll end up with a whole bunch of kind of suggestions of what your maintenance calories could be from a few different calculators. And then you kind of judge from that what it might actually be. 'cause these are not perfect. Right. And the other thing they'll ask you is how often you train.
And they'll usually ask some, [00:06:00] you know, have these ranges like one to three times a week or, four to six times a week. So let's say you do three or four times a week, then you could test both of those, but maybe air on the side of telling it that you're less active than you actually are.
And um, and then you come up with a number. So. For me, for example, uh, it came up with about 2000 calories a day. And then the second way that you could figure out your maintenance calories, uh, if you are. In maintenance mode right now. So the food that you're eating is keeping you at about the same weight, is that you actually track what you are eating, and this is gonna be more accurate than that calculator.
It's a total pain in the butt. To track everything you eat, like measure weigh write down, stick it in that app, you know, find the foods and all [00:07:00] that. It is a total pain in the butt, but you will get a better result, , because it'll be like the truth, right? How many calories you're actually putting in your mouth.
And by the way, when you're doing this, you'll actually notice if you are really being religious, that nothing crosses your lips without being written down. You'll notice that. Oh wow. I do kind of like if my kids leave a little bit of food on the plate, I do take that or, uh, yeah. In the evenings I start to crave something right before bed and I, I grab a little something, you know, even though you think you're being so good, you start to notice that, oh, okay. Actually there might be some habits here that I have.
But in any case, if you can track your calories for the whole week, that would be important and choose kind of a typical week. And the reason that I say the week is that a lot of women are fairly good during the weekdays about, you know, having consistent food.[00:08:00]
Then comes the weekend and you have some wine, you have some cheese and crackers or whatever. You're having chips in front of the tv, and it's important to get those calories in because in the end, excuse me, in the end it is the, the calories that you're eating over the course of the week that matter, right? That whole thing. So even if, let's say you were eating, I don't know, 1500 calories. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and then Saturday, Sunday, you are eating 2000 calories. You can see that over the course of the week, your average per day is not gonna be that 1500. It's going to be higher. So it's important that you get every type of day in there.
So what does your maintenance calories tell you?
It tells you that this is the amount of calories that you can eat and keep your weight pretty much steady. [00:09:00] And if you've calculated it, you know, at a point where you've been keeping your weight pretty much steady, then the eating habits that you've had right then. Have been such that you're able to maintain your weight at a steady rate.
And it also takes into account already all the exercise you do, all the steps you take every day, all that kind of thing. So when you do the weight maintenance this way, you don't need to think about your exercise, you just keep doing what you've been doing.
If you want to keep your weight about the same, then you wanna stick to eating that many calories, right? And if you wanna lose weight or lose fat, then you would want to reduce the number of calories that you are eating to be below your maintenance level.
If you are interested in losing fat, here are my top [00:10:00] six tips for you.
Okay, my tip number one is to use a weekly calorie target. All right. You can cut this down into a daily calorie target, but you need to look at the whole week. And let me explain this a little bit. So if you have A,, all right, I'm gonna use myself as an example. So when I was in my calorie deficit, my daily calorie target was 1700 calories.
All right. And some of you may be like, oh my God, can you be in a diet 1700 calories? Yes. I was in a, in a diet, in a calorie deficit, and I was losing weight regularly about, at a rate of a pound per week, being super strict about that. Um, yeah. So this 1200 calorie thing, not necessary, it depends on what your maintenance calories are, but um, my maintenance calories are about 2000 to 2200. [00:11:00] So I was in a fairly significant calorie deficit, but it was 1700 calories in any case. So I could look at that and think, okay, so I can eat 1700 calories every single day, Monday through Sunday, and I think this is where a lot of women fail in their calorie, uh, counting is that if you're good Monday through Friday, like 1700 calories, 1700, 1700, 1700, 1700, then you come around to Saturday night and now I am a very, very social person.
I love to go out with my friends on Saturday night. And yes, we have drinks, right? And alcohol has calories. And when you're in a calorie deficit on a diet, you need to be counting every single thing that goes past your lips, including the gin and tonics, the beers, the whatever. And lemme tell you, when I started investigating how many [00:12:00] calories are in drinks, I started drinking a little less.
And I was also selecting like drier white wines and, and things like that to have a little bit less calories. I digress. But the problem is that if I was just thinking like, okay, 1700, 1700, 1700, 1700, 1700. Then come Saturday night, and I'm like, oh my God, I've been so good all week. And then Saturday I just, you know, maybe I eat the same as I've done Monday through Friday.
So I've eaten 1700 calories and then I go out with my friends, and then I have. Let's say we have a long evening and I have quite a few drinks, and maybe I have some of those peanuts on the bar because I start to get hungry. And you know how when you drink you don't necessarily control your eating quite the same way, and all of a sudden I've eaten like another Well [00:13:00] with the drinks, man, you could easily, easily.
Put another thousand calories right there just on your evening out. So guess what? If you even that out over the course of the week, you've actually just sabotaged. Your, you know, your whole week just with that one night out. Right. So what I would do is I would plan for the fact that I was gonna have that night out.
I would plan for the fact that, okay, I can now have like three drinks when I go out. So on Monday, instead of hitting my 1700 calorie goal, I would have maybe 1600. Especially if I wasn't feeling particularly hungry, I wouldn't like force myself to eat the whole 1700 because actually if you're eating in a way where your food is, uh, filling and there's a lot of protein in it, you don't get as [00:14:00] hungry.
So there really, really were days where I was like, ah, okay, I'm not at 1700. And that was fine with me because I knew I would make up for it on Saturday. Right. So, yeah. So you need to think about the whole week. Think about what is your calorie target for the whole week and hit your whole week calorie target.
Okay.
Then you need to track everything, absolutely everything. And, uh, I found that easiest to do by actually writing down everything that I ate, not putting it directly into the app, because then I'd have to pull out my phone, find the app, look for the food, you know, such a pain in the ass. Not gonna do that.
So I'd write it all down, and at the end of the day, before I was gonna have my last meal, I would calculate up my calories and I'd be like, okay, am I having a last meal or am I not having a last meal? And uh, and that was, um, a way to make sure that I stayed within my limits.
Third big [00:15:00] tip is prioritize protein, and I talk about this in general. It is really important for us to maintain our muscles and to be able to build our muscles. Plus protein has the advantage of it makes you feel more satiated, right? So you feel more full, you're not gonna be as hungry and. Your body actually requires more, uh, calories when it breaks down protein.
So gram per gram, you're going to get fewer calories from protein than you do from carbohydrates and fats. So center your meals around protein, eat protein at every single meal. I really feel like this was one of the biggest keys to my success and why I was not. Hungry. I mean, towards the very end of my diet, I started to feel more hungry.
But in the beginning it was like, whatever, you know, am I really in a diet? Could this really be effective [00:16:00] because I'm not feeling hungry? But it was that protein that was really helping me.
And along with that protein idea is planning your meals. You are never gonna be successful if it's an always an ad hoc, oh my God, I'm hungry. What should I eat? And then you just grab something. No, I mean, I was so, so, so deliberate. I knew what I was gonna have for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack. All of that.
I hadn't counted like exactly the calories for each one of those meals, but they were ready to go and I had. I mean, I know the ones of you that have listened to my previous podcast describing my, my fat loss journey. I mean, I was eating so few different things. I'm not somebody that needs a whole lot of variety in food.
I feel, feel like it's, you know, food is here to keep me going. I wanted to taste good enough, but man, I eat spaghetti [00:17:00] and meat sauce. Like, yeah. 60% of my life. So, and that makes it a lot easier. And I would prep food and I had it in the fridge and, and all that. And those of you who love variety in your food, go for it.
But plan it and make sure it's easily accessible. Like you just microwave it or throw it on the frying pan or whatever it is, uh, so that you can follow the plan.
And you want to be losing fat. Right in this calorie deficit. So you need to be signaling to your body that, hey, do not use that muscle because think about what you're doing when you go into a calorie deficit. You are not. Feeding your body enough calories for it to do the things that it needs to do.
It's like you were asking your car to drive a hundred miles, but you're not giving it enough gas [00:18:00] to actually drive the hundred miles. Well, your body is not just gonna stop at the side of the road like your, like your car will, but what it does is it starts to take energy from your body in order to fuel its, day.
And it has different options of energy sources that it can take, it can take from your fat stores, but it can also break down your muscle. And muscle is an expensive tissue for your body to be toting around. So if you stick your body into a calorie deficit where it's got to kind of look inside of itself and decide, Hey, what do I wanna keep?
What? What can I get rid of? If it's like, Hey, you know what Lynn's not really using that muscle, so maybe I could get rid of that. Your muscles gonna be gone and that's not what you want. So you want to be sure that you are weight [00:19:00] training to keep telling your body that, Hey, I need that muscle. I need to be strong.
I need that muscle every week. You know, to be able to survive so that you're directing it in that way to be using the fat stores rather than the muscle stores. I mean, one researcher that I listened to said that you can lose up to 25 to 30% of the weight that you lose from your muscles if you're not weight training.
That's an enormous amount. It takes a long time to put on a pound of muscle. A lot of weeks of steady weight training, eating protein, making sure you're recovering and all those things. So don't just let it go. You know, when you go into a calorie deficit, hold onto it. Weight train.
And then my final tip is make sure that you are paying attention to your steps. [00:20:00] That you're getting enough daily movement in because your body does this very tricky thing that when you go into a calorie deficit, it says, Hey, I'm not getting so much fuel, so I need to start saving fuel. Hey. That's how we survived as humans, right?
Our bodies started to do lower energy stuff. We become like bears hibernating, you know, they've got this certain amount of energy they're not getting anymore. So they, they calm down, they slow down all their processes and everything, and we do kind of the same thing. So you'll stop talking with your hands.
If you're somebody who taps their feet, you'll stop tapping your feet. One thing I noticed was that I had a really hard time even getting myself to stand up at my standing desk and oh my God, getting out my walk pad. I mean, that was really like herculean feats 'cause my body was trying so [00:21:00] hard to save energy and yours will be doing that too. So keep doing your steps. Your NEAT is the thing that is burning more calories in your day than your workouts do. So make sure that you are maintaining that and the best way to make sure is to be tracking your steps and well, you, you may know what you have been doing before, so make sure you stay at that level.
I was aiming for 10,000 steps a day when I was in my calorie deficit because I knew I was just doing so much less talking with my hands or, or any kind of wiggling. So I wanted to make sure that I wasn't losing calorie consumption in that way.
All right, so I hope this all made sense to you and um. I have to say that we're here at the beginning of February, so there is a long way still to, summer and if you are [00:22:00] thinking that, Hey, I wanna look different this summer, I want to be like getting my body back, getting control of my body again, then really weight training is the key, especially in perimenopause and menopause, the things that used to work for you just don't work the same way because your body is different because you don't have the estrogen helping you. Your body starts to behave in different ways, and if you just start increasing your cardio to lose weight and you know, making your diets more extreme, your body is gonna respond in a way that, well, I think a lot of you have noticed that it's not doing what it used to do with those same kinds of strategies that you've used in the past. My advice would be to get started. Weight training right now if you're not already weight train. Build muscle. Get really comfortable with [00:23:00] that for the next few months.
And then as we get closer to summer, if you feel like you want to do some fat reduction, then go into the calorie deficit. Keep weight training while you're in that calorie deficit, and then you'll be able to start revealing the muscles , because in the end, if you're doing this for aesthetics, what you want. Most likely, and what I hear from women all the time is you kind of want this toned, lean, athletic, body. You wanna look like you've actually been working out. Right. And that's one of the things that kind of, oh, I remember that so well. Like going to the gym, working out like crazy five days a week.
You know, body pump dance classes, spinning classes, boot camp classes. Then seeing a picture of myself in a bikini and like, I did not look like I worked out anymore. And I used to [00:24:00] look like I worked out doing all those things, but I just didn't look like it anymore. And it's because my muscle had disappeared.
So when I got my muscle back, I got back the body that I'm used to having, plus my body feels much better. I mean, that's like the, the greatest thing about it is I just. Feel younger and more capable and can carry in the grocery bags. All those things. Get up off the floor, get off the couch, all everything.
So yes. Okay, so I'll wrap this up, if you haven't gotten weight training yet, that's what I'm here to help with. I can also help with weight loss, but particularly my thing is helping women get started.
Weight training, even if you have minor amounts of time. Let's get you going and if you're interested, check out the show notes for the links to my programs and offerings. And, uh, yeah, so [00:25:00] wishing you a great week ahead. Happy training.