Let’s Make that NOT a thing
Straight Talk about weight loss
… my body is not really mine.
Its atoms existed before me and will continue to exist long after I am gone.
My body belongs not only to me but also to those I love.
It is merely on loan to me, temporarily assembled, and if it becomes ill, the people who rely on it, who rely on me, suffer, too.
In this sense, we are all bridges to one another, stretched out tip to toe, sometimes colliding but undoubtedly joined, each one of us a possible point of communion, in happiness, in sadness, in sickness and, hopefully, in health.
15 years ago, I had the opportunity to open A CDC led program called the diabetes prevention program in St. Petersburg, Florida, where we were living at the time. I was really excited about being involved in it because part of the reason I’m really passionate about health and wellness stems back to my maternal grandfather. He developed diabetes after a massive heart attack when I was a young young girl. a lot of my growing up years revolved around taking care of my grandfather. Our family dinners, and celebrations changed after his heart attack.
at the time there wasn’t a lot of information about what type 2 diabetes was. Initially it was similar treated very similarly to type 1 diabetes with insulin, until it was discovered that was actually causing more problems. The problem is not that Type 2 Diabetics don’t make insulin.
It’s that the body wasn’t recognizing it anymore or it isn’t working. which in a type one diabetic, that’s not the problem. The beta cells in a type one diabetic just stop working and they no longer produce insulin so their bodies cannot utilize the glucose that they are taking in for energy.
So totally different diseases, but like most things, we learned the hard way that they couldn’t be treated the same, but diet was then and is now a huge factor in managing diabetes well.
fast forward
to the time, about 10 years ago in St. Petersburg where I was offered the opportunity to help open this project. I was educating the community and working with insurance companies and health care providers and coaching participants to teach them the tools to prevent diabetes. it was a huge effort in preventative medicine, which I was really excited about.
The Study that the diabetes prevention project (DPP) showed that if people could lose 7% of their body fat and increase their physical activity to 30 minutes a day, five days a week, their chances of developing diabetes would be reduced by between 50 and 75%.
Those are pretty amazing metrics!
And 7% body weight loss isn’t overwhelming for most people. you take someone who’s 200 pounds, a 7% body weight loss is maybe 15lbs and that’s doable over 17 weeks, right? It’s not as overwhelming as having to lose all of the 60 extra pounds that you are carrying in a few months (although most of us would prefer that!.)
The program rAn in a group coaching format, which really is a phenomenal way to approach behavior change. It not only provides a guide, but it also provides a community of support from others striving to make the same changes you are.
The other key pieces of the program involved weekly tracking of food, a weigh in and physical activity goals. Instead of counting calories or carbohydrates, this program had participants count fat grams. Each participant was given a specific fat gram goal to stay under each week in order to help them lose weight.
Why fat grams? Well, this study is based on the work done in the 1980s. When you look at a gram of fat versus a gram of carbohydrates versus a gram of protein., the gram of fat has nine calories and a gram of carbohydrates has four versus a gram of protein, which also has four. So the scientists and nutritionists looking at ways to help people lose weight decided that if we just tell people to cut fat, they’re going to cut more calories and we’re going to seek greater weight-loss, so let’s put our focus there.
Super easy fix , right?
Which explains this huge public health movement towards a focus on cutting fat from our diets, which created an explosion of fat free foods and at the same time, we are also seeing an increase sugar substitutes at the same time to meet the growing needs of a Type Diabetic Population in the 1980 & 90s. So did it work? Well, let’s look.
sobering
If you don’t remember obesity being so prevalent when you were growing up, it’s because it wasn’t. Things have changed A LOT in the past 30 years. And projections of the future aren’t looking any better. by 2030, one in three citizens of the U S will either have diabetes or some other metabolically preventable disease.
so the hope that cutting fat form our diets in an effort to make a big improvement in our overall health hasn’t worked.
In fact, everything has gotten worse.
The principal author is David Ludwig. , he’s a professor of pediatrics at Harvard medical school the nutrition of the Chan school of public health.
Just for some background, it’s a clinical review, they go back and they look at all the literature, all of the studies that have been done, within a certain period of time around a particular subject asking what have we learned? ( They had a lot of studies to review!)
We argue that the reason so little progress has been made against obesity and type 2 diabetes is because the field has been laboring, quite literally, in the sense intended by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, under the wrong paradigm.
This energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel-partitioning. Because these hormonal responses are dominated by the insulin signaling system, which in turn responds primarily (although not entirely) to the carbohydrate content of the diet, this thinking is now known as the carbohydrate-insulin model.
Its implications are simple and profound: People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ajcn/nqab270/6369073?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Let me just break it down for you a little bit more simply: people don’t get fat just because they eat too much or because they’re consuming more calories than they expend, but more of a result of both the quality and the quantity of carbohydrates they are consuming are creating a hormonal situation that tells our bodies to store fat.
This is kind of Mind blowing for a lot of people.
For hundreds of years, scientists believed that people became fat because they overate and the under-exercised.
And while there are pieces of that that are true. We all know that there are plenty of people that eat really low calorie and exercise all the time and they can’t lose weight and vice versa, there are those that eat a TON of food. And they never gain weight. So there’s got to be more to this than just energy in vs energy out and its not just some character flaw if you can’t maintain a health weight, right?
Still struggling with this concept? let me help you like quantify exactly what we’re talking about. If the energy in vs energy out theory was true, then overshooting our caloric intake by 10 calories a day. So as much as what’s in a single potato chip, translates into gaining a pound of fat a year and nearly 10 pounds of excess fat every decade. So in just 30 years, that tiny little imbalance, that one potato chip you have extra every day will transform anyone from lean and healthy to obese. Keep in mind that 10 calories is less than 1% of the calories of a typical American diet every day.
And that’s the overeating that. We’re talking about when we look at it simply as an energy in versus energy out.
if that were the case then the converse would be true as well. All you’d have to do is under eat by 10 calories a day And over the course of 10 years, you should be 10 pounds lighter. Right. And we know that that isn’t happening either, in fact we have an entire generation of women (and some men) who are chronically underfed and undernourished and are still not metabolically healthy or at a health weight.
The truth is, we don’t fully understand why somebody has gained weight and why someone else loses weight. In fact, some of the most celebrated Obesity researchers of the 20th century said that after 40 years of research, he still didn’t quite understand why people got fat to begin with.
another really well-known and well celebrated obesity researcher from Columbia university’s said,
“if you ever think you understand obesity, it probably indicates that you’ve lost your mind.”
It is that hard to get our heads around it.
so if you have been trying to lose weight and trying to figure out why you don’t have the energy you need and why your bodies isn’t responding the way that you think it should, you’re not crazy and you’re not alone.
There is a lot that goes into understanding weight, especially when it comes to women. And while we don’t know all the answers yet, we do know a lot more than we did 30 or 40 years ago.
Over the last couple of months, I have been involved in a certification process. Ok, Let’s be honest, It’s been more than a couple of months, but what I’ve been studying is women’s metabolic health.
Women’s Health is all about their hormones
If you are a woman, or live with a woman you know, that we cycle every 28 days, and our hormones change every week. This means that our needs change almost weekly as well. you know what I’m talking about, if you’ve ever had a period then you probably know that week four, there isn’t enough food in the house, you are hungry, your cravings kick in even those with the most determination can get derailed really quickly during that fourth week of their cycle because our caloric needs increase dramatically in order to move towards menstruation.
And then week one comes around (your bleed week) and everything is different. You can eat completely differently and you generally feel better and that changes every single week of your cycle. Then you add in things like having babies, thyroid problems, huge stressors, not getting enough sleep, nutrient imbalances and everything gets more complicated.
Going back to when I was coaching and directing the diabetes prevention project, one of the things that tipped the scales (pun intended) and made me realize that I needed to gain more tools to understand what was involved in weight and metabolic health came from several people that had been coaching through the program.
I remember one women in particular, who had been trying to lose weight for some time, she was an attorney, super smart, really well educated, hardworking, really doing her best. And she came into group one day so distraught she was sobbing. She’d gone out to lunch with colleagues.
And the only thing that she had ordered was a small salad. a spinach salad with feta cheese chicken, and an olive oil dressing. And it blew her fat grams out of the water. She had eaten so many fat grams with that salad that. She couldn’t eat any fat for the rest of the week to be able to stay underneath her fat gram goals set up by the study.
she was understandably devastated and the guy sitting next to her, he was doing just fine with his fat grams because he was snacking on Swedish fish and Skittles all day and he suggested she try that.
she looked at me and she said, how does this make any sense at all? I can’t have the one thing that I really thought was good for me yet. He can sit here and eat Swedish fish and Skittles?
She was absolutely right. It wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t right. And it wasn’t working for her.
at that point that our family was eating really differently that what I was coaching these participants to do. We were eating a high fat diet and had gotten rid of as much of the preservatives, food colorings and processed sugars that we could in our diet and I was very well aware of the clear benefits of that way of eating.
And so I left and I decided I wouldn’t coach or work in the weight loss industry anymore. It was too confusing. It was too hard. It was too emotional. I decided to just focus on developing my understanding around helping people, especially women, to balance their hormones and get healthier in other ways And then hopefully the weight would come off. Right?
Well, fast forward to my mid forties and I’m realizing that my weight wasn’t matching what my activity level was. there had to be something else that was going on. so I started to do a lot more research and sure enough there’s a LOT that’s different when it comes to women and their bodies, not only around monthly cycles, but things change depending on our age and where we are in our life cycle too. And we need to be eating differently depending on what time of life we are in.
it’s estimated that only 12% of the population of the US is metabolically healthy.
That means that only one of every 8 of us digest store and utilize our food in ways that don’t lead us towards chronic disease. Most of us will store fat instead of burn it and our bodies struggle to access those fat stores, only able to burn glucose or are insulin resistant.
we don’t get enough protein. We don’t get enough healthy fats. We’re not doing the right type of exercise for our bodies. And our guts are really, really unhealthy just adding to the problem.
We HAVE to change that.
And so I’m back in the game and better prepared this time around.
are you interested in learning more about how to recognize what your body needs:
- to lose weight,
- balance your hormones and
- heal your metabolism?
I hope so, because it’s SO GOOD.
I know that there’s a lot of messaging out there around women’s bodies.
We have always talked about women’s bodies and we probably always will.
And like everything else in our world, there are also some very, different perspectives on this issue.
definitely getting super fit is fun. It’s fabulous to feel that good and powerful. But it’s not attainable for everybody to spend three hours a day in a gym.
and you may also feel guilty for not embracing the body that you’re in without wanting to change it. In a healthy world aren’t we supposed to see those extra pounds as sexy?
If you’re reading this, I suspect you do have much to be grateful for and a few extra pounds here and there are not a reason to hate yourself.
But if something inside of you is saying:
I am not comfortable in my skin.
I don’t have the energy that I used to have.
My hormones are wackadoo.
I know that I felt better when I was I was thinner, or I didn’t have this spare tire around my middle or …… ,
Those thoughts aren’t something to be ashamed of.
you have a desire to learn more and do better and there’s nothing wrong with that.
It’s ok to want to be powerful, to feel good in your body.
To understand how to be healthy enough and strong enough to carry that baby, to play with your kids to rock your wisdom years and strong and healthy. To want to feel good working, hiking, biking or traveling… doing all the things that you love to do without the health problems that are consuming our nation.
there’s no guarantees, right?
we can’t guarantee that we won’t get sick or get injured, but we can have the peace of mind that we have done all that we can to take care of our one and only body.
So starting now, I am going to be teaching, talking and offering a lot more programming around these concepts.
But don’t worry, if you are here because you are interested in herbs or needing help with ADHD or hormone balance or the other natural wellness topics. I’ve got your back there too. It’s all connected my sweet friend.
I have a whole bunch of fabulous things that are in store for you And I am thrilled to have the opportunity to bring you just a few more tools for more balance and more wellness in your life.
You know where to find me – Instagram, Facebook, or email ([email protected]).
Until next time, be well
~Shelley