When menopause hit, I was blindsided by the stubborn weight gain that refused to budge – until I uncovered the transformative power of routine and discipline.
Join me, as we delve into the daily habits and nutrition strategies that not only helped me shed 30 pounds in five months but also set the stage for a healthier, more vibrant life post-menopause. Our conversation will unravel the morning rituals that prime you for success, from goal setting and positive affirmations to the simple act of starting your day with hydration and the potential benefits of apple cider vinegar and lemon. It's more than just a weight loss journey; it's about crafting the blueprint for wellness through the ups and downs of hormonal change.
We'll also expose the hidden enemies in our diets, particularly those sneaky calories that creep in through mindless snacking and misleading 'healthy' drinks. I'll share how meal planning and embracing whole foods can be your most reliable allies in menopause, and we'll discuss the controversial yet crucial role of daily weight monitoring. This isn't about obsessing over numbers; it's about understanding the feedback your body gives you and using it to maintain balance.
So tune in, and arm yourself with the knowledge and experience I've gained both as a physician and a fellow traveler on the path to reclaiming control over our bodies during menopause!
***
Just in case you missed it:
Join my10:21 Day Weight Loss Boot Camp, to be apart of our vibrant community and kickstart your journey!
See you there!
When menopause hit, I was blindsided by the stubborn weight gain that refused to budge – until I uncovered the transformative power of routine and discipline.
Join me, as we delve into the daily habits and nutrition strategies that not only helped me shed 30 pounds in five months but also set the stage for a healthier, more vibrant life post-menopause. Our conversation will unravel the morning rituals that prime you for success, from goal setting and positive affirmations to the simple act of starting your day with hydration and the potential benefits of apple cider vinegar and lemon. It's more than just a weight loss journey; it's about crafting the blueprint for wellness through the ups and downs of hormonal change.
We'll also expose the hidden enemies in our diets, particularly those sneaky calories that creep in through mindless snacking and misleading 'healthy' drinks. I'll share how meal planning and embracing whole foods can be your most reliable allies in menopause, and we'll discuss the controversial yet crucial role of daily weight monitoring. This isn't about obsessing over numbers; it's about understanding the feedback your body gives you and using it to maintain balance.
So tune in, and arm yourself with the knowledge and experience I've gained both as a physician and a fellow traveler on the path to reclaiming control over our bodies during menopause!
***
Just in case you missed it:
Join my10:21 Day Weight Loss Boot Camp, to be apart of our vibrant community and kickstart your journey!
See you there!
Welcome to the Thriving Through Menopause podcast. Dr Inaka Yembe, your host, is dedicated to helping you navigate the transformative journey of menopause and perimenopause, particularly focused on achieving menopausal weight loss and reducing belly fat. As a post-menopausal physician herself who has helped thousands of women experiencing the significant life stage, she understands the unique challenges you face. Listen in as we explore a wide range of topics aimed at supporting you in your health and wellness journey. Hopefully, the practical tips and strategies offered potentially help you adopt an empowering approach towards menopausal weight loss and belly fat reduction. And now here's your host, dr Inaka Yembe.
Speaker 2:Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome to my channel. Today, I will be talking about 10 habits that help me lose 30 pounds in five months. If you have been following me, you would notice that my weight gradually came down and then, towards the end of 2022, my weight drastically came down and I just changed a few things. Yes, I had a coach still have the same coach so I will be sharing with you the things that I think are the most important. Why am I talking about habits today? It's really because studies show that 40 to 45% of our actions are not really decisions that we make at the time that we are performing those actions. They're really just automatic, based on habits. And so if you want to lose weight, how about that? If you have something that you've done over and over and it becomes a habit now, that's a good way to build a habit that can work to help you for weight loss, all right. So first things first. My name is Dr Inaka Yembe. I am a medicine family medicine physician, a work full time in the emergency room, and I have an online weight loss program called Boot Camp. So if you're struggling, hit the link in my profile and join my boot camp. We have women who have successfully lost hundreds of pounds altogether. This is the fourth year of that online program. I also run an outpatient clinic in the hospital once a month where I coach face to face weight loss.
Speaker 2:My personal journey. I was born at 10 pounds, blossomed up to 300 pounds in 2005. My weight loss journey started seriously in 2010. So, 14 years after I started, I am now half of my body weights. I went from 300 pounds and now I'm in the 150. I leave this story every single day so I can tell you from personal experience and professional experience the things that work. All right, I have show notes here so you would notice me looking at my show notes so I don't miss anything. So there's a 2006 study done by Neil that showed that 45% up to 45% of our daily actions are not really what we are thinking about right now. They're really based on habits. How do habits form? If something is simple? So our brains always follow the path of least resistance. So it is simple, so you're not putting in too much effort and there's a reward. And it is repetitive, it writes a script in your brain, in the meat brain, and now it becomes a habit. So I want you to keep that in mind. So, thinking about the things that really helped me lose the weight, and this was the end of 2022. After I had lost about 127 pounds, I was able to lose the last 30 pounds and the last months of 2022.
Speaker 2:The very first thing that I did was develop a solid morning routine. So why do you need a solid morning routine? That's the only time that you have full control over compared to the rest of the day. The morning time is that's the foundation for the rest of the day. So what do you do in the morning that can really help you for weight loss success? Number one think about your goals. Number two positive affirmations. Think positive. Number three think about the little things that you would do throughout the day to be successful in your weight loss. So if you just wake up in the morning and jump into the day, listen, so many things can make you not be successful. For example, if you're in a hurry, you need to wake up early. Do not have your little morning routine.
Speaker 2:Now you're in a hurry, rushing to work. You're mad at everybody because in such a hurry get to work, the doughnuts are right there. First thing you know you've eaten about three doughnuts. No, here's how to build a solid morning routine. If you wake up at six o'clock, wake up 30 minutes earlier. Always wake up a little bit earlier so you can carve out some time for yourself. That's a time for you to sit down and think and get grounded, centered. If you're prayerful, that's a good time to pray and meditate, and if you are somebody who you really have so many negative thoughts, even if you don't, this is a good time to do five positive affirmations. Everyone in my program does five positive affirmations every single morning. It really gives you a more positive outlook on life. That will help you, even with cravings.
Speaker 2:Now, another thing that you want to do during that morning hour of power is what? Drink water. Start hydrating yourself early. So for me, when I wake up in the morning, I like to keep my water already by my bedside at night. When I wake up in the morning, the water is right there, so I start hydrating myself as soon as I wake up. You've been sleeping so many hours. We do wake up a little bit dehydrated.
Speaker 2:So making it a habit of drinking a room temperature water in the morning is going to get your body going, going to get the metabolism going. Another thing I'm going to throw this one out there. If you like, you can try it. If it doesn't work for you, don't do it. But another thing that I do in the morning is drink one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar, one tablespoon of lemon. I have that glass by my bedside with a straw. Drink that in the morning. It helps me with digestion. It just helps, keeps everything going. Now, if you try that once or twice and it hurts your stomach, don't do it. If you try it in the morning and it works for you, continue. Yes, I like to keep it room temperature because I find out that when water is too cold or too hot, I drink just tiny little sips, very little sips. However, if water is room temperature, I can drink more. However, that said, we are not the same, so do what works for you, alright, tip number two.
Speaker 2:Number two eat from smaller plates. Always, always. We need to cut down on the amount of food that we are eating. So if you eat from a smaller plate all the time, number one is going to become a habit. You always will be looking for a smaller plate or a smaller bowl, and it's going to cut your portion sizes down. There is this trick that we have taught ourselves, and we like to clean up our plate, and when we clean up our plate, it sends a message to our mind that we are satisfied. So now studies do show that when you have a small plate, you clean it up, you still feel satisfied when you have a bigger plate, you clean it up, you feel satisfied all the same.
Speaker 2:The only difference is that you have eaten less. So, women, when you're in menopause, we know that we don't have that much estrogen floating around. A basal metabolic rate is a lot slower. Women in menopause we cannot be eating the same amount of food that we did when we were 20 years old and 30 years old we're going to just slowly get bigger. Please cut down your portion sizes.
Speaker 2:Another thing to remember is eat slowly. Eat slowly and mindfully, because it takes the brain about 20 minutes or so to register that you are full. So if you are eating too fast, you can actually put away quite a bit of food before the signal comes and tells you to stop eating. So smaller plates and eat slowly. If you catch yourself eating too fast all the time, one little trick that I learned is to put your spoon or your fork down, lay it down, give it a few minutes, drink some water and then continue eating. That's going to help you to slow down and then eventually it just becomes a habit. Everything that you change. You may struggle with it a little bit in the beginning, but if you continue, it writes that script in your brain and you just do it automatically.
Speaker 2:I remember I could really eat so fast when I was in school training. I mean, we were just trained to eat fast. It's just no time to sit down and be eating for 30 minutes, so eating slowly. I had to intentionally eat, put my fork down, look around and then eat again. That's helped me and now I just eat slowly Period. You're going to eat a lot less food if you slow down the way you eat.
Speaker 2:Alright, tip number three this one, ladies, I hope you're listening. It made you a little bit on the hard side, but we need to learn to use water and not oil when we are cooking our food. This morning I made cauliflower scramble eggs. Yes, ma'am, you heard that right cauliflower scramble eggs. I put my cauliflower in the frying pan, cover it. The veggies already have water. It's sauteed slowly. I added the egg whites to that.
Speaker 2:No oil. I'm not saying that you don't need oil, but I'm saying we need a measured amount of oil. Oil, even the healthy ones olive oil, avocado oil it has 120 calories per tablespoon. So if you pour that out of the bottle into your frying pan, I mean you use all of it. This could be 300, 400 calories in your oil only. And here you are struggling. I mean just consuming too many calories.
Speaker 2:However, what I do is I cook with no oil and then, at the times that I want to consume oil, I will take my tablespoon, measure it and then add it to my food. Okay, so please learn to cook and learn to saute your veggies, your chicken, your meat. Learn to do all of that with no oil. Alright, number four this is another one that's going to hit a little bit hard on my ladies. Listen, we need to stop looking for complex recipes for daily foods. So what I mean by daily foods, my daily foods, are what I'm going to eat the whole week. For example, I'll be eating chicken, beef, turkey, fish, those kinds of things, when I prep them.
Speaker 2:I simply take season batch, cook, that's it. That's what really helps me with being consistent. Your nutrition is key. Imagine if I had to look up a recipe every single week to figure out how to cook my chicken. I mean, it's just tiring, it's overwhelming, it's too much of everything. You've got to differentiate between your daily meals and then that one meal. Yes, you're gonna research it. You're gonna make something a little bit different. I get it. I get it, but we have to have these daily meals that we eat every day.
Speaker 2:Don't make it too hard for yourself. Find one, two macros that you like. You're gonna eat those consistently. Keep things routine. Don't change your body by consuming too many different things throughout the day. Keep things consistent, and one of the good things to do is to stop looking up recipes. You know how to do this. You know how to season the chicken breast. You know how to cook some steak. You know how to do that already. Use your favorite seasonings and make those, but don't make things complicated. Weight loss is a journey for a lifetime. So when you start struggling, your body says, woohoo, I cannot learn that one. I can't take that as a habit and keep it somewhere, so you're not going to want to do it too many times. Make your cooking simple.
Speaker 2:Another thing that I do, though, is to look for things that are already partly prepared. That's just me, so if I'm going to go to the grocery store, I'm so busy. I have work, I have family, I've got mum, I've got the puppies, I've got children. I've got a lot going on every single day. Last thing I need is to spend five, six hours making one dish. I can't do that. I cannot even spend two hours. I cannot do that.
Speaker 2:So one of the things that I've started doing is getting my vegetables, which I have to eat with every meal. Get the vegetables already prepped. So I go to the frozen section. It's already prepped by the manufacturer. All I have to do is defrost it and cook it. The next thing that I've also started doing is get fresh vegetables that are already chopped by the grocery store person. So that's it. I cannot sit here and think I'm going to chop all the lovely vegetables and season them. No, no, no. I get them already partially prepped in the grocery store, as in chopped and washed, so that I can just go ahead and prep them. So think about doing that. That may help you.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:Tip number five this is another big one Stop labeling your meals as breakfast, lunch, dinner, because when you do that, you just box yourself into a certain time and a certain type of food you need to eat, and that leaves you wide open to eat anything in between your meals. So here's what I do. I have four meals a day, sometimes five, but four meals a day works the best for me. What I'm going to do is say this is meal number one, meal number two, number three and number four. My daily calories are going to be factored and divided throughout the four meals. So are my daily proteins. All my macros are divided through those four meals.
Speaker 2:I wake up in the morning and I start with the first meal or the third meal, whichever I feel like it doesn't matter. I'll start with one meal. I'll eat that. Maybe I'll finish it. If I finish it, next time I need to eat I'll eat the second one, and so on and so forth. What if I don't finish off one meal? I'll save it. And if I feel like eating again, you know me, I love to eat. That's how I got to 300. I love to eat. So if I don't finish it, when I feel like snacking, I go for my leftovers. Now, what if I finished off that first meal and I feel like snacking at this time? Hey, I just go to the next meal.
Speaker 2:This is going to help you. Number one not confine yourself to certain foods. Number two not waste your food. Number three is going to give you a controlled amount of calories through the day, because what you plan for, that's what you're eating, and the best part is going to eliminate snacking. Which brings me to the very next tip. Number six is to stop snacking. Snacking does so many things. The biggest thing that I noticed when I stopped snacking, and why I stopped snacking, is because I started keeping a food diary and I started calculating every single thing that I was eating my food and my snacks. Now, me, I love to snack on peanuts. Anybody who eats nuts you know those are some high calorie monsters and I'm telling you they are delicious. So I was eating tons of peanuts, telling myself they are healthy. However, with the amount of peanuts I was eating, honestly, it was up to a thousand calories, sometimes just in snacks.
Speaker 1:However, I wasn't really counting it.
Speaker 2:I was telling myself I'm eating healthy foods anyway. I was not taking into consideration my snacks. There's another thing I've seen floating around the 100 calorie packed snacks. Don't do that. You need to have your meals planned and if you're somebody who likes to snack when you meal prep, make provisions for those also. Do not. Do not say, hey, I'm gonna have my meals here and if I feel like eating something in between my meals, then I have a snack. Don't do that, because that just really throws off your calorie deficit.
Speaker 2:And first thing, we know we don't even know how much we are eating overall. The biggest thing to remember as women and men who are overweight, you have a hormone that is level is too high. It's called insulin, because we're eating too many calories and too many carbohydrates over time that our insulin level is high. In fact, it's become so high that we are now insulin resistant. And we made in menopause because you're in menopause, your estrogen level is low, so you are already insulin resistant because of that. Now, if you're overweight, you have high levels of insulin and you are insulin resistant also. So what does insulin resistance mean? It simply means that it's so high that your body protects you by not feeling your own insulin. So first thing you know is not breaking down the glucose anymore. Your blood sugar is high. Another thing that happens when your insulin level is high. Insulin is a fat storage hormone, so we don't want its levels to be high.
Speaker 2:This is why you want to stop snacking. When you snack on the little things, okay. So you picked up the child or the grandkids and you ate one little french fry from the little pack and you went to church and you had to sing, so you took a couple of minutes there and then you have the coffee out there. You are eating healthy, so you just have a tiny little pinch of the doughnut, not the whole thing, because you're a healthy person. See all those small amounts of sugar. They keep your insulin level on the rise. So you're going home now you're eating your chicken breast and your salad. It's not helping you at all. Your insulin level is already too high and you're storing fat. So let's not snack. Snacking is not good for you and when you're in menopause you will notice that all that snacking and the high insulin level is causing you to store their belly fat.
Speaker 1:So you want to get rid of belly fat.
Speaker 2:One good thing to do is to stop snacking. All right. Tip number seven we need to have what I call core meals. These are my basic meals when we're in menopause, especially in menopause, we want to try to keep things steady, especially when it comes to hormones. If I eat this and that and that and that, different things throughout the day, different things every day, my hormones are crazy. They're already crazy because I've been menopause and they cannot stabilize themselves If I put too many different things in my body. So what do I really mean? I've got somebody snacking. What do I mean by that? So generally for me, for example, say, for the next three days, I'm on the egg whites and whole egg and a veggie in the morning. I'll eat that every morning for about three, four days. Don't want to do the same thing too long, but yes, I can do that for about three, four days. Helps me with my meal prep, helps my body know this is what I'm going to get and it helps stabilize my hormones in the morning. High protein, very few carbohydrates first thing in the morning. Now, after that, I'm going to be eating ground turkey, lean ground turkey and a healthy carbohydrate, sweet potatoes and another veggie, and I'm here, so I'm going to add some olive oil or coconut oil I'll do that and then maybe just ground meat for dinner and rice and the vegetable. So I'm going to do the same thing for about 3 days in a row. Those are my core meals. It helps me with meal prep because I've just prepped the same few things. It also helps my body stabilize and my body is not going up and down and everywhere trying to chase what I'm eating. So have those core meals on hand. Also, have your core vegetables.
Speaker 2:I don't like vegetables. Everybody I coach knows I don't like vegetables at all, but I eat them three to four times a day. Why is that? Because they're going to help me. The fiber helps me reduce my cravings. It helps me improve my digestion. It also helps me to not store belly fat. So have those core vegetables on hand. I've boiled it down to green beans. The green beans is the easiest thing for me. I just have them right there, I can just chew them. And cauliflower, those are the easiest ones for me. However, you do you, but have them available. Why? Because this is going to take us to tip number eight Vegetables with protein. Every single meal is a must. That's what's really going to help you keep your weight down. You want to consume at least 30 grams of protein with every meal. Add vegetables to that. That's like the best of both worlds. It's going to help you stay full longer. It's going to help you get rid of that belly fat.
Speaker 2:It's going to help you improve your digestion and it keeps your calorie, your overall calorie intake, low. Why? Because when you consume this amount of protein, it really helps you with satiety. Anyone who has increased their protein consumption you will notice that you don't really feel as hungry as you did.
Speaker 2:However, if you went for lunch and you had a Big Mac and some Coke, here you are, you've consumed, yes, at least 1300 calories, 1200 calories. And it's not long after the fact, one or two hours, you're thinking, whoop, I wish I had something else to eat, because it just went through your system and the gone. You just don't feel it. However, if you sat down and ate your chicken breast at your veggies, these just stick with you for hours and hours and hours and you're thinking, no, I'm not hungry. So tip number eight is the most important. One of the most important for long-term, sustainable weight loss is to eat protein and veggies every single meal.
Speaker 2:Alright, tip number nine still on the nutrition. Why is that Nutrition? What you eat and what you drink is going to be responsible for 75 to 80% of your weight. This is why I am so big of nutrition. Very important that you get your nutrition correct. And once you get that correct and you do that over and over and over and find easy ways to do things, then it's going to write that script in your mind. You see the results you know we like results and your brain remembers the things that make you feel happy and it makes you want to do them over and over and over. So tip number nine. This is another big one. Please stop drinking your calories.
Speaker 2:I get questions all the time about a few things that we think are healthy, but they're really not. The green drinks that are already pre-made by the manufacturer in the grocery store. Run away from them. If you look at the nutrition facts on the back of the bottle, it's going to say something like 57 grams of carbohydrates per serving, and that's just per serving. Eight ounces, god forbid, you drank the whole bottle, may not give you that many calories, but whoo-hoo, you all of a sudden had about 400 or 500 grams of carbohydrate. No wonder the belly fat is here and you need to be eating any food. You're just trying to drink the green smoothie because you're trying to be healthy. Don't do that. Don't do that. Just go for real food. Don't drink your calories.
Speaker 2:Another place where calories are hidden are in the coffees. I see coffee. This is why I bought my best day. I bought my own coffee bar, my own coffee maker, which you could just get you any coffee, make yours at home. Listen, once you go out there and start enjoying these delicious coffees. I had a coffee that was offered to me today and, wow, it was so delicious I said I have got to not drown the whole thing.
Speaker 1:I can't lie.
Speaker 2:I dropped the whole thing. It was so delicious and I came home and did the research. Only the milk in that coffee is the hundred and fifty calories. Okay, the rest of it, forget it. I'm too embarrassed to say what you just in a cup of coffee that didn't even give me any food, so do not drink your calories. One of the another place where calories are hidden are in juices, so now I see people doing juice cleanse.
Speaker 2:Listen, if you made a boss out of woman and you want to do a juice cleanse, I'm going to ask you what is a cleanse? I'm not saying that, no, a fruit. But if you think about, the amount of fruit used to extract in the glass of juice is a lot. If you want to make a glass of Orange juice, you're using maybe six or seven oranges. That's a lot is going to hit you liver. That fructose, natural sugar, is going to drive itself into your bloodstream. Insulin goes up barely fat storage.
Speaker 2:Don't drink those calories. Eat the whole fruit. It will serve you better. You get all the nutrients, you get some fiber, yes, and you do not get as much fructose. So juices and Storbot juices now Storbot smoothies, know. However, you can make your own smoothie. Use a protein powder, use a vegetable added to it and make your own smoothie at home. Don't buy what's in the store. Why? Because they pay people, humans, hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in their paychecks to make those juices more delicious than ever. So that's why they are loaded with chemicals, they're loaded with sugar and they loaded with things that you don't want in your body long term.
Speaker 2:Those are dangerous. Dangerous, all right, now we're gonna talk about this. Please don't give me too much bad feedback on this one alcohol. Alcohol, does the empty calories all right? In my life in weight loss, I have learned. I have learned Nothing. Nobody can be a hundred percent perfect. Do I drink alcohol? Yes, sometimes, but not every day. It's so important that you don't do it every day, especially as a female in menopause. Why is that? Number one empty calories. Number two is too hard on your liver. Number three it calls a new drink enough enough, and people who drink like binge drink on. Alcohol is just plainly toxic. Anyway, it's just toxic.
Speaker 2:Hot on your nerves hot on your heart hard on your liver is just plain toxic. So don't do the alcohol every day.
Speaker 2:It's just not good for you and you're going to get liver damage from that one now the studies are looking like, the majority of women who qualify for liver transplant and now post menopausal women, most of them are not even consuming alcohol, so they have non-acoholic liver disease. And if you drink alcohol on top of the liver disease that most of us may have without even knowing it, that's causing you so many problems. Alright, tip number 10 this is another tricky, tricky one, and please, please, please do not kill the messenger. I'm just bringing you this message as one that I hope you can take. This kindly, weigh yourself every day. If you don't measure it, you can keep up with it. Weigh yourself every day. The studies do show that people who weigh themselves daily have better self-regulation and can improve their weight loss.
Speaker 1:Alright when I say weigh yourself daily.
Speaker 2:Let's not get stuck on the number. What you see on the scale gives you an idea, gives you feedback, gives you something that tells you hey, this is how my body is responding to what. I don't know what I ate yesterday. I don't know what I did, but it gives you something to follow through. It's very important that you weigh yourself Now. I don't want to come away myself once a month.
Speaker 1:What if I was?
Speaker 2:working so hard the really working hard or not, even once a week? What if I'm working so hard all week long? I did weigh myself and I came at the end of the week and I weigh myself and I was five pounds heavier.
Speaker 1:Oh.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, this is it, I'm done. Most of us. At that point we say you know what I?
Speaker 2:may as well just go back to my own ways, because it's going to be the same thing. However, if you weigh yourself every day without being stuck on the number, it gives you a metric to look at. You will notice that your weight may go up and down and up and down. That's okay, but I'm looking at an overall downward trend for the whole week. So think, even though you weigh yourself every day, just think about the overall trend for the whole week. You just want to collect data on what your body is doing on a daily basis. Alright, so that was tip number 10. I have a bonus tip.
Speaker 2:We've talked about mindset things. We've talked about nutrition. One bonus tip to add here is exercise. We do know that exercise yes, it's responsible for maybe just 20 25% of your weight.
Speaker 2:If I'm trying to lose weight Listen, I need all the tools, all the tools that can help me in addition to sleeping, drinking water, reducing my stress yes, all these things. Staying a caloric deficit, I get it. I get it, but exercise doesn't have a big one. Sometimes we have this misconception I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to exercise enough that I'm going to lose weight. Or I hear people in my clinic tell me hey, listen, I've been working out and nothing is happening. Or they'll say well, I stopped working out and so my weight is going up. This is a yes and a no for me. What I say is that exercise can help you, but it actually really helps with your overall health more so, that said, if you want to be successful and consistent, think about an exercise that you could make a habit, something that you can happily do every day. I'm not saying for exercise, we're just going to relax here and do things without Increasing a heart rate or without putting any effort in it.
Speaker 2:However, Exercise is one of those things that we want to be consistent with also. So what is it that you can do that is going to become a habit for you? What is it? What is that thing? A few things to think about are your daily steps, daily steps, I good thing that you can make a habit. For example, you can say I'm going to make sure that my steps are at least 7000 every single day, and so by no time I'm looking, I want it to be about 4,000 my noon time and if not, you know what, my lunch break, I'm going to make it 30 minutes of eating and maybe another 30 minutes of walking around the building. That's a good way to add some activity into your daily routine.
Speaker 2:Another thing to think about is this non, non exercise activity, temulgenesis, so the amount of exercise or the amount of energy that your body uses when you're not exercising, all that does is, if you think about it, is you just move often, just get up and move. So if you tell yourself, well, every time I come home, I'm going to put the dishes away, I'm going to do something, just do something and be consistent with it, whatever it is that works for you, you want to do that. And yes, once I would say once in a week or twice a week you can step out of your regular routine and learn something new. That's something new, hopefully, for you. Women in menopause should be resistance exercise. So how does that look like on a daily basis?
Speaker 1:I'm going to say you know what, every evening, once I come home.
Speaker 2:I'm going to have supper with the family and after that I'm going to go warm the dogs for the next 30 minutes. So that's my regular daily exercise that I like to do just walking the dogs. However, since I'm in menopause, you know what I'm going to do. Say, a workout once or twice a week, a resistance workout, because that's going to work better for you long term. Let's flip that. If I get up and say I want to lose weight and I want to do resistance exercise five times a week, well, yes, with one you may. With two you may. However, it comes with three and four and five. Is it sustainable for you? Meanwhile, if you were just walking every single day and add something else that you learn, yes, that may be more sustainable. So, think about an exercise goal that you could make a habit. So just a quick summary here.
Speaker 2:We've talked about the morning routine. We've talked about reducing your portion sizes. We've talked about not using oil to saute your vegetables or your beef. Do that with just water Most vegetables have water anyway and come back and add oil intentionally, in a measured amount.
Speaker 2:Stop looking up recipes to make your daily core meals. Do that. Use recipes, maybe once or twice a month. Even Stop labeling your meals as breakfast, lunch, dinner. Level them as meal one, two, three, four. That allows you the flexibility of eating whatever you want from your meal prep at any time during the day. That's going to help you stop snacking. Eat your protein and your vegetables with every single meal. Don't drink your calories.
Speaker 2:Weigh yourself often. I didn't see somebody who said daily weighing doesn't work for you. I get it, so we don't have to weigh ourselves daily. Even Absolutely doesn't work. What I mean is weigh yourself often, maybe more often than once a week, because that may help you stay on track and then think about a type of exercise that you can do consistently. But set a goal for that one. All right. That's it for my 10 tips. My next boot camp online boot camp starts on January, the 24th. If you're interested, go ahead and send me a direct message. All right, my friends, that's it for this evening. Have a happy and healthy evening, all right, thank you. Thank you, bye.
Speaker 1:Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Thriving Through Menopause. We hope you found valuable insights and practical advice to support your journey. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast, share it and review. Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Remember, menopause doesn't have to be a challenge. It can be an opportunity for growth, renewal and self-care. Connect with us on social media, where we share additional resources, tips and advice to help you along your path. Once again, thanks for listening in and we hope you'll join us again on the next episode of Thriving Through Menopause. Until then,