125 | Why Am I Not Losing Weight??

Welcome back to another episode of the Real Health Podcast. The month of June, we're all about nutrition and helping you achieve whatever goal you have in regards to body composition changes. Dr. Reed spoke on last week Nutrition 101. This week we're going talk about what happens when you just can't lose weight.

That stubborn weight loss plateau or what we would frame as weight loss resistance. Why is it that you are not losing weight? I'm gonna give you some strategies, some cutting edge solutions to reversing weight loss resistance. At the core of what's happening, it's really an issue in your hormonal system. So, who does this podcast go out to?

Probably the 40-60 year old female whose hormones have shifted and they just are stuck and they can't lose weight. Actually, it's one of those things where they keep gaining weight, even though they're taking all these measures. So, what's happening at the core of the hormonal system? Well, we're going to talk about two main hormones, we're about leptin, we're talking about insulin. Leptin resistance is at the hallmark of why we can't lose weight.

Leptin is a hormone that signals to your brain to burn fat. In essence, when leptin is produced and your brain hears it, the brain will then shift your metabolism into burning mode. The problem is when we get resistant to that hormone. The hormone is naturally produced when you're full. When you eat and you have calories coming in, as well as a certain amount of fat, your body will produce a hormone called leptin.

Leptin keeps our metabolism in check. But what happens over time, long standing stress, poor nutrition, yoyo dieting, and inflammation robs you from achieving your weight loss goals. The issue really comes to where our brain does not hear leptin anymore. We're resistant to the hormone, and no longer will the brain signal to the body to burn fat for energy. Today's episode, we're gonna reverse insulin and leptin resistance through some recommendations that we have.

Okay? So let's dive into it. Let's talk through insulin resistance and leptin resistance and some solutions to help you achieve your weight loss goals. So the thing we're gonna talk about is nutrition. And you gotta hear me here on this.

You have to track your nutrition. If you don't know what you're eating and how much of it you're eating, we can't get started. You can't just assume you're eating 1,800 calories and telling us that hey, you're eating 1,800 calories and I can't lose weight. Well, there are so many hidden calories in foods today, you have to track. You have to monitor.

How many calories are you actually consuming a day? How much protein are you consuming? How much fiber are you consuming? So the strategy is you have to track. If you have the data, then you can do something about it.

If you're not tracking, well, then we have no data points. Okay? So the recommendation is track your macronutrients so you know exactly how much you're you're you're consuming. Now, with that data, you're also gonna do a body composition evaluation. The body composition evaluation is essential to know your resting metabolic rate.

It's pretty much gonna tell us how many calories do you need a day. Right? It's gonna tell us how much fat you have, how much lean muscle you have. The issue that most people get into is they start working hard. They're training the gym, you know, and they're stepping on a scale every day, and maybe that number doesn't change, maybe it even increases.

But how do we know what's actually happening underneath the surface? Are you gaining muscle? Are you losing muscle? Are you gaining fat? Are you losing fat?

We may not know exactly how much your body composition is changing if we don't have data. So, let's get some data. How do we get data? We track our macronutrients and we get a body composition. For the month of June, this is if you live in Knoxville, the month of June, at our office in West Knoxville, we are doing a free InBody.

So, it's a free InBody for all people that are hearing this podcast and patients in the office. You can come to our West office at the Real Health Co. and get a free InBody. What's an InBody? It's gonna tell us exactly how much muscle you have, how much fat you have, what's your hydration level, what's your resting metabolic rate. And that'll help us set the stage for the end of month workshop master class that we're doing to actually talk about that InBody and how to set your nutrients based on that.

Make sure you get ahold of us through our Instagram linktree, set up an appointment, and we'll get that InBody done. All right, let's talk about nutrition modification. What's the one thing we want you to focus on? You need to prioritize protein, fiber, and healthy fats. Protein, fiber, and healthy fats.

Protein is very satiating. Fiber is very satiating. Okay? So, it fills you up. It's hard to overeat protein and vegetables.

Really is. It would be almost nearly impossible to eat lean protein and vegetables and gain weight. So, we need to prioritize our protein, particularly animal protein, have a ton of fiber, and we need to exchange our bad fats for healthy fats. Olive oil, okay, is a fantastic fat, as well as some nuts and seeds. The problem is that you can get in a little bit of trouble if you're consuming too many nuts and seeds because those are high, high calorie foods.

So we want to prioritize fat and protein and fiber, but particularly healthy fats that burn easy. When we look at our nutrition, how much protein? Typically, we recommend a minimum .5 grams per pound of body weight. Now, that can be anywhere between 25% typically of the calories that you need a day is at minimum protein, and that can jump all the way up to 30% or more depending upon the actual goal. But every meal that you consume should be three meals a day, and every meal should prioritize protein, fiber, and healthy fats.

That's the goal. Okay? We're reducing carbohydrates. Why? Because carbohydrates lead to insulin resistance, and we're trying to reverse insulin resistance.

And if we reverse insulin resistance, we're reversing leptin resistance. So, we wanna make sure that not only are we high fiber, high protein, we're lower on the glycemic index for our carbohydrates. Now, we can follow that strategy for about five days, and typically what we do, and as an advanced strategy, we'll talk about fasting and carb refeeding days. Carb refeeding days are essential at helping break through weight loss resistance. We're not gonna talk about that today.

We're gonna do that at the master class at the end of the month. We're gonna talk about specifically how to do carb refeeding. Right now, prioritize what? Protein, fiber, and healthy fats. The thing I want you to start doing is I want you to start training.

How much do you train? We talk about this all the time, right? But the part in weight loss resistance is moving your body. You wanna do two things. Aerobic exercise, high output VO2 max training, and strength training.

We should be strength training at least two to three days a week. We should be getting at least 10,000 steps a day, and we should be sprinting, doing some VO two max training to really help drive the necessary change hormonally to help reverse leptin resistance. If you're not strength training and know just, you know, sticking around five pound dumbbells, right, and not changing reps and weight and sets is not gonna cut it. You have to have progressive overload. K?

Again, we'll be diving us through some of those strategies to help you understand a little bit more on how to tailor training specifically to your needs. One of the biggest issues with weight loss resistance: stress. When we look at stress, stress cortisol specifically can create leptin resistance. So how much are you sleeping? Well, you should be sleeping seven to eight seven to eight hours at minimum per night.

What do you do for your stress? Are you doing breath work every single day? Are you are you cold plunging? Are you getting the sauna? Are you training?

Are you reading? Are you journaling? Are you meditating on scripture? Stress management is so important at helping modulate your hormonal system that can reverse leptin sensitivity as well. So we need to support our stress and sleep.

That's number three. Number four, embrace intermittent fasting. So going twelve hours or fourteen hours without eating can help reset leptin resistance. You don't necessarily need to do this every day, and we'll talk about how to do this more intentionally in our master class. But doing some periodic intermittent fasting could be really, really good to help reset insulin and lectin levels even for females.

Now there's a right way to do it, and we'll talk about that even more in-depth. But number four, embrace intermittent fasting. Number five, we've gotta reduce inflammation. Inflammation is a primary issue in leptin resistance and insulin resistance. That's why a lot of our patients, when we put on very specific detoxification programs, lose weight.

Why? Because you get the inflammation out of the body. And when we reduce oxidative stress, reduce inflammation, they start to lose weight. They start to burn fat. Their metabolism works better.

Your metabolism gets stuck when it's toxic, when your body is toxic. Removing toxins, consuming healthy fats, reducing inflammation, taking turmeric and ginger and herbs and spices and omega-three fatty acids, what does that all do? It reduces inflammation. And inflammation reduction directly affects the brain in a good way to drive more leptin sensitivity. We've got to get inflammation levels low.

And that's why a lot of patients, even from Advanced Solutions, we do like an autoimmune Paleo diet where we're reducing these high inflammatory foods in addition to targeting protein and fiber and healthy fats. There is this idea that- a lot of people, it doesn't make sense, but when you understand metabolism, then it becomes clearer. We call it reverse dieting, but in essence, what we do is we increase calories strategically every week to drive metabolic change. One of the biggest problems that we see with patients is that they starve themselves to try to lose weight. 1,000 calories, 800 calories, which is so low, it's so low.

Because they're just confused, hey, how much do I eat? How much does it take to lose weight? But, when the body gets caught in starvation mode, it shuts the hormonal system down. When it perceives, hey, I'm gonna eat a thousand calories a day, I need to preserve my body. This is like, hey, winter's coming.

This is a primitive response of the body that says, hey, I need to get into what we call starvation mode and protect my physiology. So, if you're trying to starve yourself to lose weight, it's not gonna work. We actually have to refeed you. We've gotta get your calories up. If you're 1,000, we gotta get it up to 2,000.

How do we do it? We do it strategically. But you can't stay at 1,000 calories and expect to have hair, skin, nails, energy, brain function, hormone function, gut function, thyroid function, and the list goes on. You cannot stay at a caloric deficit too long. Short term, sure.

Long term, it's not gonna happen. You're not gonna have breakthrough. We've got to refeed the body and strategically add calories each week to boost your metabolism and to drive necessary weight loss changes. When we look at these six strategies, these are the cutting edge strategies to lose weight. But hey, it takes discipline.

It's not gonna happen in a day. It's not gonna happen in a week. It may not happen in a month. But if you stack these necessary changes over time, you will see the results that you're hoping to see. The problem is most people won't see the results in a week, and they get frustrated, or a month, and get frustrated, and they give up.

The reality is all we're trying to do is create daily disciplines and rhythms to drive the necessary hormonal shift. We're not gonna you're not 20 years old anymore. You're not gonna lose weight and gain weight as easy as you used to. Okay? It's gonna take time.

It's gonna take repetition. But healing takes time and repetition. We've got to do the same thing over and over again. Okay? And over time, we're gonna stack these habits and see the changes that you wanna make.

When we talk about weight loss resistance, you gotta understand at the core of it, it's a hormonal issue. At the core of what's happening, we need to balance hormones and drive a new physiology, a new change to the system. It takes discipline. Two things I want you to leave with. One, if you don't know your current body fat and muscle, you need to come to the office.

Get an InBody, schedule it. Number two, sign up for a master class so you can learn cutting edge strategies on intermittent fasting, refeeding, and carb cycling. And we're going talk specifically how to pair your resting metabolic rate with the right macronutrients to achieve the weight loss that you desire. Thanks for listening to another episode of the Real Health Podcast.

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