EP 70: How Fast Should Women Over 40 Lose Fat; The Truth About Sustainable Fat Loss

0:00Shauna:Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better, and Stronger Over 40. I'm your host and coach Shauna. I'm a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach helping women over 40 become their best. And today's episode is one you're going to want to tune in for because we're going to talk about fat loss, but more specifically, how quickly can we lose fat? If you're a woman over 40 trying to lose fat, the goal should not be to lose as fast as possible. The goal should be to lose fat while building a body that's stronger, more metabolically healthy, and more responsive to fat loss long term.

0:26Shauna:because when fat loss is rushed or done the wrong way, you can lose muscle, metabolism will adapt downward, and the results become harder to maintain, leaving you right back where you started, repeating that vicious diet cycle over and over again without ever seeing the results that you want. That was my story for years until I learned the right way to approach fat loss, especially after 40. Today, I'm gonna break down how fast fat loss should happen, what will help the process, what will harm it, and how you can end fat loss the right way so that you can keep your results. Now, before we dive in, let's start with why fat loss can feel so much harder after 40 in the first place.

1:02Shauna:If you hit your 40s and feel like your body suddenly stopped responding, you're not alone. So many women that I work with are eating healthy. They're working out and they're trying to stay consistent, yet their bodies never change. And most of the time, it's not because their bodies are broken, but it's because it's adapted to years of dieting and exercising in ways that are working against their body. Most of us over 40 have spent years dieting, doing more and more cardio, and never really focused on building muscle. So over time, the combination of muscle loss from the wrong approaches and age-related muscle loss leaves our bodies with less muscle and slower metabolisms that have adapted to eating less calories.

1:39Shauna:When we try to lose fat now, the body doesn't respond as it should. And the solution is not to push harder. It's actually to rebuild a body that's responsive to fat loss. And that means prioritizing strength training so that you build and maintain muscle. It means fueling your body instead of constantly under eating. And it means approaching fat loss in phases instead of trying to diet forever. When those things are in place, fat loss becomes much more predictable and sustainable. Now let's talk about how fast fat loss should happen because this can trip us up too. One of the biggest reasons I see women feeling frustrated with a fat loss phase is because we've been conditioned to expect this scale is going to drop quickly.

2:17Shauna:The 90s pushed extreme approaches, huge calorie cuts, eliminating entire food groups like carbs, detoxes, or cleanses that promise rapid weight loss. And when we followed those plans, the scale might have dropped quickly, but most of that weight was not body fat. It was water loss from cutting carbs and depleting our glycogen stores, along with muscle loss from aggressive calorie deficits and inadequate protein. The scale would drop fast in the beginning, but the body was often losing muscle and our metabolism was being slowed down in the process. This is exactly where I was and exactly what I see with so many women who come to work with me.

2:50I'm actually working with a client right now who is a perfect example of this. She came to me stuck after trying almost every single diet out there, including Octavia that had her eating 1 ,200 calories or less, which is not ideal for supporting lean muscle or supporting your hormone health. She's a busy working mom juggling work during the week and then kids' sports on the weekends. And like many women, she was doing her best, but nothing was changing. So instead of pushing her into another aggressive deficit, the first thing we worked on was improving her metabolism and her body composition.

3:19We focused on strength training, increasing her calories to a healthier, more appropriate level, and creating a plan that she could actually stick to. And once her body was in a better place and she had more muscle on her frame, we then moved into fat loss. Now she's losing body fat, eating more than she did before, and she's doing it in a way that's sustainable for her lifestyle. And when I show you her scale chart, What you're going to notice is the progress is not linear. There are days when the scale went up, days where the scale stayed the same. When you look at her overall trend, she's averaging about a pound of fat loss per week,

3:50Shauna:which is really healthy and sustainable. Healthy rates of fat loss are anywhere from a half a pound to a pound a week, sometimes less and sometimes more. But having that expectation is really important so that you don't necessarily quit or overcorrect when you don't need to. This is also why tracking the trends is so important. Your weight is going to fluctuate day to day for several different reasons like hormones, stress, when you ate, how late you ate, if you were sick, if you had a hard workout. Like you can see in my client's chart, she has lots of fluctuations, but when we look at the overall trend, she is losing.

4:22You can see that steady, sustainable rate of loss resulted in a 20-pound transformation for her. That's sustainable fat loss. That's what it looks like. Not dramatic drops every week, but consistent progress over time. Now that you know what realistic fat loss looks like, let's get into what can help or harm your fat loss goals. Fat loss over 40 done well is actually pretty simple when you know the right habits to focus on. Strength training, of course, is going to be the most important piece because it helps to support and preserve muscle, which is going to improve your metabolism, get you that shape and definition.

4:54And it's the organ of longevity. So we want to have as much muscle tissue as possible for the years ahead. Now, having enough protein in a deficit is another key factor so that you can support lean muscle tissue, preserve it or build it. It's also going to help with satiety, keeping you fuller, and it's going to help your metabolism as it takes more calories just to digest it. So you want to make sure you're having at least 30 to 50 grams each meal. Now, another key point here is that you want to make sure that your calorie deficit is something that's conservative, nothing extreme. You need to be in a calorie deficit, meaning you are eating less than your body burns so that your body can tap into your fat stores and use them for energy.

5:28But when your calorie deficit is too aggressive, it can start to work against you. This is also why you want to make sure you're in a good place to start a calorie deficit and you have a healthy maintenance level of calories so you don't have to bring them so low in order to see progress. Another key thing to focus on when you're in a calorie deficit is daily movement or steps. When you're eating less, your body is going to try to conserve energy. So when you're tracking your steps and making sure that you're maintaining them or even getting a little bit more, you're going to make sure that your caloric output stays the same.

5:57Without tracking that, sometimes our daily movement will start to slow down and your non-exercise activity or your daily movement really impacts your metabolism. So making sure that you're tracking that, maintaining it, or even improving it during your deficit is only going to help with your fat loss. And it's not going to spike hunger like other intense cardio can, which is really important in a deficit. And then lastly, you want to pay attention to sleep and stress management as they play a big role as to how our body responds to fat loss. So make sure you're getting seven plus hours of sleep a night and try to manage your stress with things like breath work, taking a walk or praying.

6:32Those are my top three things that really can help with managing your stress and keeping you in a good place. When you start a calorie deficit from a healthy level of being in calories and stay consistent with the habits that we just talked about, fat loss becomes much more predictable. On the flip side, there are some things that can actually slow down your progress. And many women are unknowingly doing these things, making their fat loss journeys that much harder. One of the first things that you might be doing that's making your fat loss journey over 40 harder is chronically dieting. Like we talked about before, when you constantly are eating less and less, your body will over time adapt to those lower calorie numbers.

7:05So we want to make sure we are ending a deficit by reversing slowly into our new maintenance calories where we can protect our metabolism. The thing that you might be doing that's harming your fat loss goals is solely focusing on cardio or too much cardio, which can actually break down more muscle tissue. And again, that's going to downregulate our metabolism, making it much more likely that we are going to rebound at the end and stay soft and stuck. And then lastly, when we're not prioritizing sleep or stress, that's going to poorly impact our hunger hormones, our cortisol levels, and make us retain more water and have our bodies be less responsive to fat loss.

7:38So we want to make sure we are prioritizing the right things. Fat loss over 40 works best when the body feels supported, not constantly stressed. So make sure you're in a good place to start fat loss, lean into the right habits, and do not stay in a calorie deficit forever. It's a phase, not a lifestyle. Fat loss should not be a permanent state. The goal is to end the fat loss and then go back to your new maintenance level of calories where your body, your metabolism, and your hormones can thrive. Cycling between phases of maintenance and fat loss phases are far more effective than trying to stay in a fat loss phase year-round.

8:09That's often a conversation that I have with my clients, especially during certain seasons of the year, like the holidays. That might not be the best time to be focused on fat loss or summer when we're traveling. Those might be better times for us to focus on being in maintenance, improving our metabolism, adding more lean muscle tissue to our frames. So our bodies are responsive for fat loss once we are ready and the season allows for it. Remember, fat loss over 40 is not about pushing harder. It's about working smarter. It's about creating a body that's stronger, healthier and more metabolically active.

8:38And if you're listening to this, realizing that maybe your body isn't the issue, but it's actually the methods that you've been using. and you've never been taught how to approach fat loss in a way that works with your body, that's exactly why I created my Soft to Sculpted mini course. Inside that program, I walk you through three key trainings that show you how to completely change the way your body responds to fat loss. In the first video training, we talk all about metabolism, what is happening to it, how we can improve it, and make sure our bodies are responsive to fat loss again. And the second training is called Build to Burn, and this is where I teach you how to use the gym to build muscle and change the shape of your body.

9:10Most women have never been taught how to train with the right intensity or to use progressive overload. When you build more muscle, your body becomes more metabolically active and much better at burning fat and keeping it off. And the third training teaches you how to cycle your nutrition. So instead of dieting forever, you're going to learn how to walk through phases of maintenance and fat loss so that your body is responsive and your results are easier to get and keep. Together, these trainings give you a clear roadmap of how to go from soft to stuck over 40 to sculpted and strong. You can find all of the information below.

9:43I really hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, I'd be so thankful if you left a rating or a review. And if you have show ideas, please DM me on Instagram. I would love to hear from you. And until next week, keep getting stronger.