Why Eating 800 Calories Isn't Working In Perimenopause & What To Do Instead

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Transcript

Why The Old Rules Fail

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast episode. Today we are going to be diving deep into why eating less and doing more HIT workout is not the answer in perimenopause what you should be doing instead. So if you're listening and you're in your 40s or 50s, you're barely eating anything, you're doing HIT four or five times a week, maybe you're running, cycling, whatever it is, and the scale will not move, will not budge, or your body, your body composition will not change, or even worse, the scale might be creeping up. I need you to listen to this episode, okay? And I need to tell you right now that it is not your willpower, it is not discipline, it's not that you're not trying hard enough. What you're doing right now actually might be the thing that is keeping you stuck and you don't even realize it. So I want to talk about why the old societal narrative of eat less, move more, do more cardio, all these things that you hear stop working and perimenopause. I'm gonna walk you through what's happening in your body hormonally, why a big giant salad and two boiled eggs for breakfast only with a black coffee is not the flex that you think it is, why calorie tracking and macro tracking and nutrient density actually matter more, not less. And I'm going to tell you about a client that I've been working with. She just came to me and she was eating 800,000 calories a day, still overweight, still insulin resistant. And then we'll get into how you should actually be training and living at this age. So I'm gonna share with you literally exactly what she was eating, all of the things, and walk you through why it was not working for her.

Estrogen, Insulin, And Cortisol Collide

SPEAKER_00 1:44

So let's actually cover the hormone piece first because I think most women get told, oh, it's just your hormones, oh, it's just a phase of life, oh, it's just a season of life, it's normal. And nobody actually is explaining to you what this means. So what happens in perimenopause? Estrogen starts declining, but it's not declining at like a straight line. It doesn't just come straight down, it swings. So it's ebbing and flowing. Some months it's high, some months it's low, but that swing in itself is very stressful on the body. Estrogen plays a huge role in how sensitive your cells are to insulin. When your estrogen drops, your body's ability to be able to use glucose and store it properly, so your insulin sensitivity also drops with it. This means that your body needs to produce more insulin to do the same job that it used to do with less. So basically, when estrogen is dropping, your body cannot use carbs as efficiently. Carbs, food, period, as efficiently. And at the same time, cortisol tends to run on the higher end and is less regulated in this part of life. So poor sleep, which a lot of you are already dealing with because estrogen is decreasing, you're dealing with higher cortisol. Not only that, when you're doing the undereating, overtraining, this is going to raise cortisol. All of these things, poor sleep, under eating, overtraining, all of these raise cortisol. And I want you to know too that poor sleep can also cause cortisol to be higher. So there's several different things. But cortisol's whole job is to raise your blood sugar so that you have readily available fuel ready. So now you have blood sugar going up from cortisol being up, and then insulin resistance stacked on top of that from the estrogen declining, from cortisol being higher, and your pancreas is working in overdrive trying to keep up with this. And this is not the part that they don't tell you any of this because I don't know why they don't tell you, but they don't. But the stuff that you did and you tried in your 20s and your 30s, and the eat less and the add more cardio, and to work your body into the ground was working with a totally different hormonal makeup. You, your your estrogen was more stable, it was higher, you had better insulin sensitivity because you have more muscle, probably, and you had better sleep going on. But doing this same strategy right now is like using a map from a city that is no longer existent, from a country city that's no longer existent. And you just recognizing that your body is not the same as it once was before, as it once was in your 20s, 30s is going to be the biggest thing to understand. And the pattern that I keep seeing over and over again from women, from talking to them in my DMs, from them coming to work with me, is things start to get harder. Weight starts creeping up, energy starts tanking. And what do most women do? They pull the only lever that they've ever been taught to pull, eating less. And some, not all, some adding more cardio. And it makes everything worse because the thing that is broken, which is insulin sensitivity, declining estrogen, is not something that you can fix by restricting and working your body harder and harder. This is actually making it worse. So the pattern that I really want to talk about is the a very specific pattern I see because I think a lot of women are doing this and not even realizing that it's the problem.

The Clean Eating Pattern That Stalls

SPEAKER_00 5:33

You're eating, quote unquote, clean and healthy. I see it. You have a massive salad for lunch and another one for dinner, and maybe like some boiled eggs and coffee with your creamer and sugar in the morning, and you're not hitting fiber. You're getting like four grams of fiber, and you think that eating a salad is the most healthiest thing you can get. You think that eating potatoes and starchy vegetables and starchy potatoes and all these things are bad for you, and they are not. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, all of these foods are what is going to actually stabilize your blood sugar. A salad really has no nutritional value. There's hardly any fiber in it. But whenever you're getting fiber from avocado, from sweet potato, from bell peppers, from zucchini, and all these things are going into a meal, you're getting far, far, far more fiber than you would a big, gigantic salad, which also has not near as many antioxidants or nutrients that you're going to get from a potato. And you're probably not getting enough protein either because if you're eating two boiled eggs, okay, a boiled eggs has six grams of protein in it. That's 12 grams of protein, and that's your meal right there. And then you're getting a salad and you got a chicken breast on there that's maybe 30 grams of protein, and then you're having another maybe chicken breast or steak or something that has 30 grams of protein for dinner. Okay, that's hypothetically like 70 grams of protein right there. When most women, ideally, the women that I work with need anywhere from 100 to 130 grams of protein per day. Yes, that's what you need. Specifically because we don't want our bone health to be declining, our muscle health to be declining, and protein is the building block for that, for the recovery. And it's going to keep you satiated for longer, so you're not going to feel like you're so dang ravenous and you feel like you're doing everything right because on paper it looks right and you're still not losing weight. Some of you gaining. I'm not telling you to stop eating a salad, but when a giant salad is replacing actual sufficient food, when it's showing up alongside an 800 calorie or 1000 calories for the day and little to no protein, your body, little to no protein, little no fiber, little to no healthy fat either. Fat is what makes up our hormones, what makes up our cholesterol. And whenever we we're not eating healthy fats because we're eating this low fat diet, our body hates that so much. Your body cannot tell the difference between I am intentionally restricting because I want to lose fat, and there is quote unquote famine happening. All it knows is that the energy that's coming in is not enough to run the systems it needs to run. It's not enough for your brain to be powered and to be getting through your work days. It's not enough for you to be recovering from your exercise and your overtraining if that's what you're doing. It's simply not enough for the bodily functions, the metabolic functions going on in your body. So it responds the way it was designed to respond to scarcity. It raises your cortisol to mobilize stored energy and it holds on to fat because fat is stored energy, and stored energy is safety in famine. And that stress response that we were talking about spikes your blood sugar, which asks your pancreas for more insulin, which is the exact thing that makes insulin resistance worse, not better, or stagnant, not better. So that eating less directly is directly working against the outcome that you want. You think you're creating a calorie deficit that should produce fat loss, but what you're actually doing is creating a stress response that makes your body defend its fat stores harder and then pushes your insulin resistance in the wrong direction. This is the biggest piece that I really want to hammer home. Eating less does not lower insulin. In a body that is already insulin resistant, especially in this season of life, eating less can make your insulin resistance worse. So

A Real Food Log Wake Up Call

SPEAKER_00 9:45

now I want to dive deep into this client that I started working with. And I think her story is going to sound very familiar to a lot of you listening. So she came to me overweight, insulin resistant, tired, fatigued, not sleeping well, digestion very inconsistent, um, bloated, irregular, switching from diarrhea to constipation. And then when she sent me what she was actually eating, I was not surprised at all. But it still gets me every time. Boiled eggs, black coffee with sugar, a salad. She was eating somewhere between 800 and 1,000 calories a day. And actually, I'm gonna pull it up. Her the foods that she was sending me that she was um eating. So let me pull it up really quick because I want to be able to be able to sh like tell you the specific foods so you can really see. So I had her start sending me her meals, and she was also tracking them as well. But this is what it looks like. Breakfast one day was literally just two eggs with spinach and some tea. Lunch was a bed of spinach, like two, two spoonfuls of cottage cheese, and one boiled egg and like three slices of carrots. A snack was an apple with cottage cheese, and dinner was half a chicken breast and green beans. I know what you're thinking, Hendley. That's so healthy. That sounds so healthy. Yeah, and also that was around 800 calories. Okay. And not only that, let me just pull it up because those are the pictures, but I really want to, I want to share with you the actual calories intake that day was. Okay, okay, you ready for it? You ready for it? 1024, 65 grams of protein, 33 grams of fat, and 75 grams of carbs. Okay, five grams of fiber. Five grams of fiber. This is not ideal. And then the next day, 780 calories, 71 grams of protein, 36 grams of fat, 39 grams of carbs this day. Again, another five grams of carbs that day. Or fiber, my bad. Breakfast, coffee with some sugar, two hard-boiled eggs, lunch, lettuce, cucumber, carrots, spinach, grilled chicken, Italian dressing, snack, cottage cheese, and blueberries, dinner, a taco salad with only lettuce, meat, cheese, tomatoes, and some cucumber. 780 calories. Now I'm not dissing her because she didn't know any better. This is all she's been told, and she's gone to functional health doctors, and they don't they don't give out nutrition meal plan type things like I do. But I just wanted to show you like this is what she was eating, and this, and she's not losing weight on that. She is not losing weight eating the 780 calories. She's not lazy, she was not doing this wrong on purpose. She was doing exactly what she had been told her entire life. Every diet, every piece of advice, every magazine and app and program told her the same thing: eat less, push harder. If it's not working, you're not restricting enough. So when I told her the plan, we're gonna start eating more, you know, more potatoes, more protein, overall, more food on her plate. I had her eating blueberries, oatmeal, chia seed, avocado. She was terrified. I mean, I really want you to sit with that for a second because I think a lot of you listening are going to be feeling that same fear. She'd spent her entire adult life believing that food was the enemy and that eating more was the one thing that she could not do. The idea of adding potato to her plate felt like she was doing the exact opposite of what she needed to lose weight. And she even told me a couple days ago after the meal plan, I updated the meal plan, she said, not gonna lie, every time I eat, I feel like I'm cheating on a diet. She said, I said, What makes you feel that way? She said that it's so much food and I haven't felt hungry at all. I'm used to thinking that diet dieting meant suffering. I said, I totally understand that. And she said, I think it goes back to being told my entire adult life that I should only eat 1200 calories or less to lose weight. I've also been told to stay away from potatoes or any vegetable that grows underground. Your plan makes more sense. These foods are what help me feel full longer instead of vegetables like lettuce. Hmm. But her body had been trying to lose weight on the 800 to a thousand calories for like who knows how long and not responding. It wasn't going to respond because it was too busy trying to survive what it perceived as starvation to even worry about losing fat. So we've started adding in some foods back, so late more protein, actual starches, potatoes, rice, fruit, got her total in we've brought I've brought her total intake up way more. I'm talking like I think I got it up to 1700 calories because I just want her body to respond to actually run properly. And this part bear matters so much to me. It's it's not just about the number on the scale, but I'm really anxious to see how her energy is gonna start improving, her sleep's gonna start improving, and her digestion will start improving. It will really, really make a difference. And I cannot wait for that. Anyways,

Tracking For Awareness Not Restriction

SPEAKER_00 15:21

why tracking? I really want to be also clear about because about tracking, because eating more on its own is not the full picture, and I do not want anyone taking that and running with it the wrong way. It's not just about eating more of anything, it's about eating enough and eating enough of the right things. This is where nutrient density, micronutrients, and actually tracking your food intake becomes so important, especially for women who have spent so many years of their life under-eating. If you have been under-eating for a very long time, you've probably lost touch with what your actual intake even looks like. And this is why I had her sending me pictures and logging that because so many women I work with are shocked when they track for the first time. And it's not because even most of them are eating too much, but because they realize how little they've actually been eating, how little protein is in their day. And just teaching them that tracking is not a restriction, it's just awareness. It's to bring awareness around the gap between what you think you're eating and what you're actually eating. And the nutrient density aspect matters so much because your hormonal systems, your thyroid, your reproductive hormones, your stress response, all of this runs on actual building blocks of proteins and minerals and fruits and vegetables and getting enough total energy. A body that's running on lettuce and black coffee does not have the raw materials to regulate insulin, build muscle, support hormone production, support sleep. And this is the whole idea, too, behind testing your hormones and seeing what's going on and seeing your cortisol instead of guessing. You do not have to guess your way through this by cutting more. When you find out what is actually happening, when you can actually see all of your symptoms laid out, you can start to build a plan around real data, around your actual intake, around your symptoms, and giving your body real nutrient targets.

Strength, Steps, And Sleep First

SPEAKER_00 17:20

So you're like, okay, well, Highly, if eating less and doing more cardio isn't the answer, then what is? Strength training needs to be the priority 100% full stop. Muscle is one of the most underrated, but the most best tools you can have for improving your insulin sensitivity. Because muscle is where a huge amount of the glucose from your food actually gets used. The more muscle you carry, the more capacity you have to handle carbohydrates without your blood sugar spiking and your insulin having to work overtime. Lifting weights two to four times a week matters so much more than any amount of cardio that you could do. Now, I'm not demonizing cardio because cardio still has its place, but it needs to look a little bit different. Low intensity, steady state. HIIT is honestly not bad either, but doing this every day for your only form of exercise is not it. But low intensity zone two cardio, keeping your heart rate between 120 and 130, just walking, getting steps are gonna serve you so much more than the chronic, constant, high-intensity, chronic HIT state. And when you're doing that on in a body that's already dealing with elevated cortisol from hormonal shifts and poor sleep, it is just adding more stress on top of stress. Walking, especially outside in nature, is doing the complete opposite. The walking itself is going to support your blood sugar regulation without asking your nervous system to go into fight or flight five days a week. Morning sunlight, another big thing, big small thing, but has a big impact. Getting outside within the first hour of your body waking up is going to help set your circadian rhythm, which then affects your cortisol's curve, which then is going to affect all of the other things that we have mentioned in here. Your melatonin production later that night, your overall sleep quality. Sleep is not optional. It is not optional. It is one of the biggest levers that you can have for insulin sensitivity. And if you struggle with sleep, you need to create a wind-down routine that works best for you. Incorporating magnesium glycinate, 400 milligrams before sleep, reducing your screen time before bed, having like a wind down routine. I would say one to two hours before bed, you should be winding down. Poor sleep alone can worsen the insulin resistance. So if you are just white knuckling through five hours a night, that is something that you need to fix alongside your meal plan. And

HRT Options And Final Takeaway

SPEAKER_00 19:55

I do want to slightly mention HRT, hormone replacement therapy here because I feel like it needs important. This is not something that you should be scared of or dismiss. For a lot of women, HRT is a legitimate tool. And I think it's very important that it does get introduced in perimenopause because it can help you from not experiencing all of those hormonal fluctuations that you're having and can really help to stabilize it out. And by HRT, I don't mean birth control. Okay. I mean hormone replacement therapy. I mean, I mean real estrogen, real progesterone. Like I said, especially given how much estrogen decline is driving a lot of what we have talked about today, estrogen, progesterone stacked together with testosterone is definitely a thing to start exploring. I would definitely talk to your doctor, your healthcare provider about that. If they don't, if they don't offer that, I do have resources for that and you can reach out to me and I will send you, send you on your way with that. Anyways, I know I've been yapping a lot here, but if there's one specific thing that I want you to take away from this, is doing less is not the answer right now. The answer is doing the right things instead of doing more of the wrong things. So eating enough, actually strength training, protecting your sleep and working with your body, not against it. This working with your body instead of against it is the whole philosophy that I build everything on. Your body is not broken, it is not something that needs to be fixed, is not working against you. It is just asking for something different than what you are currently giving that, giving it. And once you can give it that, it will start to work with you again. What worked, if what worked for you 10 years ago is not working for you now, then you need to change your approach. You need to put put down your ego and be like, okay, I actually do need to change something, I need to change something right now. So hope you guys got some great information out of this, some tools and knowledge, and maybe just some insight. And maybe you really just got like an aha moment of wow, actually, um, I need to change my ways. I need to be open to different ways of my health and my body and changing those. So I appreciate you guys so much for tuning in, and I will see you in the next episode. Bye.