EP 88: She Ate 700 More Calories... and Lost Fat After 40

0:00Hello and welcome back to Becoming Her, Fitter, Better and Stronger over 40. I'm your host and coach Shauna. I am 47, a wife, a boy mom, and a fitness and nutrition coach, helping women over 40 become their best. In today's episode, we are going to talk all about how eating more can unlock your best body. Yes, that's right. I said eating more, not less. That's exactly what I did with a recent client of mine. We took her from eating 1 ,500 calories to eating 2 ,200 calories and looking better than ever. If you're a woman in your 30s or your 40s and you're dealing with stubborn fat loss, you are in the gym, you're eating your protein, but you're not seeing the changes that you want to, this is the video for you.

0:35Because that's exactly where Lila was just a few short months ago. And she's not alone. In fact, a lot of the clients that I work with come to me in this exact situation. They are trying so hard, but yet still soft and stuck. That was my story too for years until I learned the truth about what it does take to build a tone, strong, and defined body. Most of us were taught to move more and eat less, but that can backfire, especially when we start dealing with muscle loss and changes with their hormones. Because of that, we sometimes have to do the very opposite of everything we've been taught. And that's exactly what we did with Lila.

1:05She's now eating more, training less, she's down pounds, down inches, has more energy, more confidence, and is feeling liberated because she knows change is possible. So today I want to walk you through exactly what we did with her and more importantly, why it works so you can go from stuck to sculpted too. And make sure you stick around to the end because this phased approach is exactly how I help my clients transform and I know can help you too. If you're new here, hi, I'm Shauna. Welcome. I'm a fitness and nutrition coach helping women over 40 become their best. If you want to see more content like that, please subscribe and stick around because I share tips that will help you.

1:36Let's dive right in. And let's go back a little bit. You know, when Lila came to me, she was eating about 1500 calories a day and she had been there for a good amount of time, months to years. And many women can relate. Most of us started dieting somewhere in our twenties and we never really stopped. We just swapped one out for another. Maybe we would see some progress, but it was never really long lasting. It never built us the body that we wanted. And now nothing seems to help at all. But here's the part that no one explained to us about chronic dieting. When we are chronically eating less and less, our body reads that as a threat.

2:05It's not thinking, oh, she's trying to look good for summer. It's thinking there's a scarcity of food. We need to do something to protect her. Metabolism will slow. Hunger hormones become dysregulated. Thyroid can downshift. Movement will slow. Things like steps throughout the day will slow down without you ever even noticing that it happened. And the piece that really matters is that we will start to lose muscle. When you don't have enough calories, your body just doesn't burn fat for energy. It can also go after muscle tissue too, especially if you're not lifting heavy enough or eating enough protein to protect it.

2:33And muscle is your metabolic engine. It's what's burning calories for you all day long, even by just sitting here and existing. Then we add in age-related muscle loss, and that will slow metabolism down even more. The very thing we thought would be helping us is quietly keeping us stuck. And this slowing of your metabolism is just called metabolic adaptation. It's what your body is meant to do when food is scarce. As metabolism slows, your maintenance level of calories will change. So now, for a lot of women, 1 ,500 calories is in a deficit, which is not ideal because now we have no runway. We have no room to adjust into a sustainable deficit.

3:05If you start a fat loss phase and you're already sitting at rock bottom with your calories and a metabolism that's slowed down to protect itself and less muscle, you have zero room to adjust when things stall. That was where Lila was. She had no runway left. She was stalled because her body adapted to survive on what she was giving it. She knew something had to change, and that's where I came in. Now, this is the part that's going to sound backwards, but hang with me here because this is really the point of this whole video. Instead of starting with cutting lightless calories even more, we did the exact opposite.

3:35We slowly increased them week by week, allowing your body to adjust to more food without packing on pounds. And this is called reverse dieting. And it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Instead of restricting deliberately, you slowly increase your calories over time in a structured way to basically tell your body, hey, food isn't scarce anymore. And doing this slowly is important because if you jump calories up too fast, your body can respond with water retention, bloating, and that will scare you right back into being in a deficit before your body has a chance to recover. But when you raise calories gradually in phases, you give your metabolism a chance to actually catch up.

4:09Your thyroid has a chance to normalize your hunger and your fullness. Hormones will regulate and you're just going to give yourself that time to recover. And this reverse dieting phase where we are priming metabolism is one that I use often with clients who have been in a situation like Lila, where they've been underfed and their metabolisms are sluggish and slow. Now with Lila, she started at 1500 calories. We worked in stages, watching everything along the way, her weight trends, her hunger, how she was performing in the gym, how she was recovering. It was slow, deliberate, and we worked all the way up to 2200 calories.

4:39And here's what happened. Her body started to respond again because her body actually had the fuel it needed to do all the things that she wanted. She was getting stronger. Her muscles actually had the energy and the building blocks to recover and grow. Her recovery got better because her hormones had the support they needed to do their job. And the scale, the things she was most afraid of, actually started to stabilize and even trend downward. Hey, I hope you're enjoying today's episode. Before we jump back in, I get asked all the time, what are my go-to supplements? Honestly, my two staples are protein and creatine, and my go-to brand is Legion.

5:10I love them because they're third-party tested, made with high quality natural ingredients, and they have amazing customer service plus a money back guarantee. I will leave my supplement guide linked below and you can use my code for an extra discount. Now let's get back to today's episode. And this is the part that a lot of women never get to see because they're so scared to even try it. Your body needs time and consistency with enough fuel so that it can build muscle and you can be in a good place where you can reliably lose fat again. You cannot out-restrict a metabolism that's already been starved for months or years.

5:41You have to rebuild it first. And that part can be scary. Lila was nervous, but she was also tired of not seeing changes. So she leaned into something different. And here's what happened when she did. The scale came down. She lost inches. She looks strong, defined. And this is just the start because we aren't even in her deficit. But none of this would have happened by running the old program of eating less and burning more calories in the gym. It came from the boring, unsexy basics done consistently and long enough to actually work. First, fueling her body properly, not just eating as little as possible and calling it discipline, but actually giving her body enough energy to function, recover, and build.

6:17Fueling her properly was step number one. Second was lifting with progression with a proper strength training program, not just going to the gym and trying to sweat and burn a lot of calories, but lifting with intention, getting close to failure, tracking weekly, adding weight or reps, and giving her muscle a reason to adapt and grow. Muscle is what's driving her metabolism and her body composition changes. And third was all about rest and recovery. Not adding more workouts, more sweat, more burn, but having active rest states, having enough sleep. Recovery is when your body rebuilds and repairs muscle.

6:48When you skip it, you're just breaking things down with nothing to show for it. And fourth was walking. Consistent movement outside the gym that helped her recovery. Those boring fundamentals done consistently will transform your body like nothing else will. Ask Lila or the other clients that I've walked through this process. I know the idea of doing something different is scary. The idea of eating more, lifting heavier, but it has changed my physique in the best of ways, as well as all of the women that I have helped transform. I know all of this might be new to you and you still might need some help putting it into action.

7:19And that's why I created my free masterclass all about metabolism over 40. Inside this free training, you'll learn how to improve your metabolism, how to train in the gym so that you build muscle and burn more fat, and then how you can phase your nutrition to support your goals. I will leave the link in the description below. Make sure you have a look. And if you take anything away from this video, please remember your best body over 40 is going to be built, not burned. It's going to be nourished, not famished. It's going to be strong, not small. Remember that and take it with you because I want a whole gang of strong women over 40 changing the way that aging looks.

7:53And muscle is the exact thing that will help us get there. Thank you so much for watching. If you need more help on your Fit Over 40 journey, I will leave all the ways to work with me linked below. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I genuinely hope you found it helpful. If you did, I'd be so thankful if you left a rating or a review. And until next week, keep getting stronger and I'll see you in the next episode.