Weight Loss for Petite Women | E15

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Hey team! Welcome back to Train Like a Girl. My name is Abby. I am an online health and fitness coach and I mostly work with women. And I unpack BS on the weekly. So if you're here listening, thank you so much. I've actually had a bit of a dip in listens because I've been quite quiet on Instagram lately, which I need to undo. I need to get back into it and get these listens up. But if you are here, that means that you are probably an OG and I really appreciate you. So thanks so much for being here. Especially for today's topic, because it is something I'm so passionate about, which will come as no surprise when I tell you that it is all about weight loss for petite women. And as a five-foot gal myself, this is something that I have struggled with, managed, battled, tried to figure out, worked with for years. And not only with myself, but with other women too. So I just really want to get into this with you because I know how frustrating it can be to be a petite woman that seems to be doing everything right. You feel like you've locked in on your exercise, you're ticking all the right boxes, and it's just not happening for you. So let's chat about it because this is something that confuses so many of the women I speak to, particularly the petite women, but not only petite women, but particularly petite women. And that is, yeah, why weight loss can feel so much harder even when you feel like you're doing everything right. So I'm gonna explain this in as simple terms as I possibly can because honestly, when you understand the basic maths and science behind this, it makes so much more sense about why the process can just feel so bloody frustrating. So I'm gonna start by saying, yes, it is harder for us petite gals to lose weight and to maintain that leaner physique. So if you've ever been on a diet or, you know, been relentlessly trying to go at it in the gym or whatever, and you're thinking, why can my partner eat so much more than me, or why can my friends seem to stay leaner, or why does that person on Instagram don't even get me started on Instagram and the expectations on there? But it is so common for us petite girls to fall into that trap of comparison because it truly is trickier for us to lose weight. So I'm gonna tell you all about why. And as I said, we're gonna delve into the science of it because otherwise I can't it's it's hard to explain it otherwise, but I will keep it basic terms. So first thing is first weight loss. We know this anyway, but I'm gonna reiterate this from the start. Weight loss comes down to energy balance. So your body burns calories every day by just existing, right? By just moving through life. And then you eat calories through food. If over time you eat slightly less than your body burns, you will lose fat. That is the foundation of fat loss. That is a calorie deficit. If you want to know more on that, go back to episode one, fat loss fundamentals, if you need more kind of clarity around that. But now we've got that out of the way. The important number here that we want to talk about today is something called your TDE. Stay with me. This just in layman's terms is it basically it literally means total daily energy expenditure. So that is in layman's terms, how many calories your body burns in a day. Those calories that are burnt include calories burned to keep you alive, calories burned walking around, calories burned exercising, digestion, digesting food, everything. But crucially, the important part here is most of your daily burn actually comes from just being alive. Which a lot of people get wrong, actually. So many people think if I just exercise more, I'll burn more energy. And whilst in theory that might be the case, what a lot of people miss is that actually the majority of our calorie burn is our BMR, which is our basal metabolic rate. You may have heard this like from the doctors or whatever, but your BMR is nothing to do with exercise. It is you breathing, it's your brain function, your organs working, it's like blood pumping around your body. It is basically just your body running. That energy burn, your BMR, usually makes up around 60 to 75% of the calories that you burn in a day. So when people talk about metabolism, this is mostly what they mean. The reason I mention all of this is because being petite here matters. Smaller bodies, more petite bodies, simply require less energy to run. You've got less total tissue, you're smaller, less overall mass to maintain maintain. So as a as a result of that, your body naturally burns fewer calories at rest. So, in other words, that BMR, your basal metabolic rate, that takes up 60 to 75% of your energy burn is lower. So, in a nutshell, smaller equals lower BMR. And our BMR is the majority of our energy burn each day. So if we're trying to outrun our calories, it's gonna be pretty tricky, right? Because 75% of our burn is just we can't do anything about it. It's locked in. It's literally just how much how much energy our body burns just by being alive. And unfortunately, that is a tough pill to swallow. Like when you're smaller, you you need less energy, you need fewer calories to exist, basically. So what this means is your overall TDEE, total daily energy expenditure is obviously then lower, right? So this is the entire reason why weight loss can feel heart so much harder for us petite gals. So I guess the good thing about this is it's we know from this, your body's not broken. You know, a lot of a lot of small women come to me thinking my metabolism's broken, or I'm doing something wrong, or fat loss doesn't work for me, calorie deficit doesn't work for me. But it's not that you can lose weight, it's just that we're already starting with a smaller bank of calories. Because your calorie budget is smaller from the from the get-go. Your calorie budget, even to maintain your current um weight, is smaller. So let's make this really practical. Imagine one person, think about somebody that is maybe a bit taller than you and can eat more calories. Let's imagine that person burns around, and I'm plucking numbers out of the air here. This isn't obviously rooted in any single person, but imagine one person burns around 2,400 calories a day. A petite woman might burn more like, and this again, don't like lock these on to yourself. This is you know, everyone's gonna have an individual amount of calories that they burn, but a petite woman might burn more like 1,700 calories a day, which is not that's not unheard of. It's quite quite common for a petite woman. So person A, 2,400 calories a day to maintain that weight. Person B, petite woman, 1,700 calories to maintain that weight. Now imagine both of these people want to lose weight. Technically, and a lot of what we hear online is that a 500 calorie deficit a day is quite a good thing to aim for because 500 calories a day less is 3,500 calories a week, which is roughly half a kilo of fat loss per week. Roughly. So 3,500 calories is roughly half a kilo of weight. So if you were in a 3,500 calorie deficit across the week, you would lose half a kilo. So 500 calorie daily deficit is quite a standard for a lot of people. But here's the problem. For the person that burns 2,400 calories, a 500 calorie deficit still leaves them eating 1,900 calories a day, which is quite a manageable manageable number of calories for a lot of people, right? We can we can deal with that. We can 1,000 that gives us enough like calories to play with to have three decent meals and maybe a couple of snacks. But for the petite woman that starts out maintain maintaining at 1,700, a 500 calorie deficit would leave her eating 1,200 calories a day. And for a lot of people, in fact, I'm gonna say it, I would never put a client on that little calories because for most of us, unless we're bloody bodybuilders, that is gonna be really, really difficult to sustain. It's really hard socially. We live in an obesogenic environment. In other words, we live in an environment where we go out for a meal, we could blast all of those calories just in one meal, right? So it's really hard socially, it's harder with hunger, it's harder with energy, and honestly, it's just so unrealistic long term. So this is why with a petite woman, we s the fat loss fundamentals don't change. We still need to create a deficit in order to lose weight, but crucially, in my experience anyway, or in my practice, I would put the petite woman on a smaller deficit. So instead of instead of chopping 500 calories off their day, I'd probably be look at leaning more towards 200, maybe 250 calories off per day. And smaller deficits absolutely do work, but obviously, if the deficit is smaller, one, the rate of loss is slower, but also it's so easy to kind of like undo that deficit, it's so easy to accidentally eat 200 calories, there's less room for error, right? But because it's let's go back to point number one, the rate of loss is then slower because we're only in a 200-calorie deficit per day, let's say. So instead of seeing like a large traumatic weekly drop, progress might look more like a couple of hundred grams per week off the scale. And obviously, the visual change will take longer. Generally, everything will just be a little bit slower. And it might be that if you're tracking your body weight using the scales, which is what I have most of my clients do, the scale might not move for a long time. Or you might have large fluctuations on the scale because, you know, there are other factors at play like water weight, pre-period weight, your weight might go up. Even if you've done a big gym session the next day, we might weigh heavier. If you've had more salt the day before, there's so many factors that change the scale weight. But when you are only losing, you know, a couple of hundred grams per week in your deficit, that's so easily masked by like a glass of water before you've weighed yourself, or if you've not been to the toilet, for example, you know? So with petite clients, what I find is we're on a smaller deficit, and so it takes longer to show up on the scale, the visual changes take longer, and so petite clients or petite women that are trying to diet, they start to panic potentially and think it doesn't work, it's not working for me. When actually it probably is. It probably is. It's just that we haven't given it the time and the patience, and we don't have the understanding around the scale weight, we don't have the understanding that it might be a bit slower for us, especially if we want it to be attainable long term, you know. So it's important to remember that when fat loss is happening more slowly, these, you know, scale fluctuations can completely hide progress temporarily. So that's why some weeks you could do everything perfectly and the scale stays the same. Then suddenly a week later, it might all drop at once. But it's sticking with it long enough to appreciate that, right? So having this understanding that for if you're a petite person, your fat loss might just take longer and the scale might not be reflective of what's happening. So we need to zoom out in those situations. So that's one consideration that I really drill in with my petite clients. So if you're doing everything perfectly, trust the process. There are other things at play as well, though. So another thing I think has really messed with people's expectations, especially petite people, is exercise. People think, oh, I'll burn more calories if I do much more exercise. But exercise honestly burns way less than most people think, especially for smaller bodies. And don't get me wrong, obviously, as a personal trainer, I am gonna promote strength training, I'm gonna promote cardio, I'm gonna working out and training, especially training, is amazing for your health, muscle retention, muscle building, strength, body composition, like your bones, there's a list as long as my arm, but it usually doesn't create these giant calorie deficits that people imagine. And actually, it can bite you in the bum as well. If you start doing loads of cardio, there are a ton of studies that suggest, and actually, I've lived experience of this too, that our hunger can then spike dramatically, which makes then sticking to a calorie deficit even harder. So, contrary to what you might see on social media or might kind of be tempted to do, chucking a ton of cardio into your life might not be the answer. The main thing always comes back to your overall daily energy expenditure and then your food in intake. So that brings us back full circle to if your TDEEE is lower, the margin for error is just smaller, right? So it's not about chucking on loads more calories, it's about being very aware of what's coming in. Because the margin for error, as I said earlier, is gonna be bigger. We're if we're only in a 200-calorie deficit per day, that is so easy to undo, right? Like we have a little bit more oil in the pan, or we we have a few bites and licks across the day, a few a few bits here and there, slightly bigger portion on the weekends, extra cooking oil, little snacks that you forget about, all of those things matter more because your calorie budget is already smaller than the average person. Does that make sense? So that's why for petite women like me, it can often feel like I'm doing everything right, but I'm not losing weight. Because, you know, uh a couple of things here. So we'll go back to number one, you could be doing all the right things. It's just that the scale and the movement is slower, and it's not you're not getting that rapid rate of loss. But also, it we have to be honest with ourselves. Does my deficit exists on paper, but is that my is my real life slowly eating into that? Am I actually having those calories, or am I having a few bites here and there that are adding up and then pulling me out of that deficit? So all of that is to say, and what this brings me on to is I think the biggest struggle then here is psychological because the slow progress feels really discouraging. You look around, you see other people dropping weight faster, and you assume that you should be able to do the same thing, but our bodies have different energy needs, and it's also psychologically distressing because we seemingly then have to monitor things a bit more closely because it's like, well, 200 calories ain't much of a deficit, so if I don't achieve that, like it's you know, it's gonna be easy for things to slide, but it is just the reality. Unfortunately, a taller person with a higher TDEE simply has more room to create a larger deficit without feeling awful, you know? So it doesn't the good thing is you can stop this comparison because it doesn't mean that your taller friend or partner is more disciplined, and it doesn't mean that your body is resisting fat loss either. It just means that your body is operating on a smaller energy budget. So once you understand that, the goal can stop meaning how do I lose weight as fast as possible, and instead it becomes how can I create a smaller, more attainable deficit that I can actually maintain consistent consistently? Because this is another thing because of that scale and because of like the slower loss, people, petite women, they give up quicker because they're like, oh, I'm not seeing it, it's not working. But that's why for us petite gals, consistency matters way more than like aggression, because if we're going in with aggression, aggressive deficits are gonna be so hard for us because the calories are gonna be so low. So what I find is the sweet spot, and I find this for myself as well. The sweet spot is one, a smaller deficit, two, patience, but then there's other things we can add in here too. So if we look at a good whack of protein, we're gonna stay full. If we look at volume foods, that's gonna make our pla our meals look bigger. You know, there's tips and tricks that we can implement to make that deficit feel more attainable. And then of course, I'm gonna advocate for strength training and just generally good daily habits, like a good step count and not crazy amounts of cardio, but a little bit of cardio. And just setting realistic expectations for yourself and being like, okay, I'm petite, it might be tougher for me, but I either throw in the towel because it's hard, or I accept that it might be a bit slower for me, but at least that will lead to sustainable results, not trying to survive on the lowest calories possible. Because yes, the fat loss may be slower, but slower does not mean impossible. It just means that the process is more subtle and requires a bit more patience and maybe a bit more of an eye on things, just being really careful about the choices we make and ensuring that that deficit and the meals that you choose to eat in that deficit that fit within your calories have good nutrition, they're balanced, but they still fit within that calorie budget. So if you want help with this, as you can tell, it is something I'm super passionate about, and I just would love to help more and more petite women because I feel you, girl. Um I'd love to work with you. If you want more help with this, please drop me a line. You can see um notes in the show notes if you want more details about how to work with me. But for now, that is everything today. If you have any experience in struggling with weight loss as a petite gal, I would love to hear from you. So yeah, drop me a line and I will speak to you next week.