Transcription
Everyone is talking about inflammation and how it can affect your ability to be able to lose weight in peri- and post-menopause. And so, you're probably trying to follow some of the advice you've been given. Like, maybe it's taking turmeric, cutting out dairy, [music] cutting out gluten, taking your omega-3s, drinking tart cherry juice. You're eating most of your meals at home. You're not overeating. You're trying to lose weight. You're doing the exercise. Yet, things aren't really budging for you. You're still stiff and sore in the morning. You're still struggling with bloating. You're feeling puffy. And that belly fat in the middle just doesn't seem to disappear.
And the issue isn't necessarily inflammation being the enemy, because we do need inflammation. It's how we heal. It's actually very protective. So, the issue isn't that you have inflammation. [music] It's that it never turns off.
And the reason that it won't turn off, will nutrition have a piece in this? Absolutely. But, when we're looking at women specifically in peri- and post-menopause, it has a lot more to do with the hormone that just walked out. That was helping you [music] for the last 30 years. That was anti-inflammatory. That supported your blood sugar. And so, when we are just trying to add in all these supplements, it doesn't actually fix things. Cutting out all this food doesn't [music] necessarily fix things.
We need to understand first and foremost what inflammation actually is and what it does. How it [music] actually locks your body into a fat-storing state, making weight loss really freaking hard. [music] Why it gets worse in peri- and post-menopause. And then, the actual steps that you need to take [music] to calm inflammation in your body to make fat loss possible. And there's a specific order to this, which is what we're going to talk about today as well.
>> [music] >>
My name is Stephanie Craswell, and I'm the CEO and founder of Vitality OET. We specialize in fat loss and women's hormones, particularly as they start going through peri- and post-menopause. We have helped thousands of women transform not only their bodies after past fat loss methods stopped working, but also get control of their lives again.
And today, like I mentioned, we're tackling all things inflammation: what it is, how it blocks your fat burning pathways, >> [music] >> why it matters so much more in peri and post menopause, and the actual steps to calm your system in the right order so you can start getting the results you've been working so, so hard for.
And so, I like to talk about clients when we first kick it off because it paints the picture of, oh my gosh, yes, this is the thing that I'm struggling with. So, let's talk about Renee, cuz she probably sounds a lot like you. She came to us at 51, and she was a nurse manager. And women who know nurses know how hectic and crazy that lifestyle is. And every other nurse on the floor would go to her when crap hit the fan, right? That's the nurse manager, the head nurse on call, the charge nurse.
And she was the good patient. She was the person who did everything right. She had read all the articles, she had cut gluten out 2 years ago, then she cut out the dairies, then the nightshades, cuz she heard that was an issue. Her cupboard was basically a pharmacy with a ton of different anti-inflammatory supplements: turmeric in the morning, having her fish oil at night. Everything that you can imagine was in there. But yet, she was still feeling super puffy every single day. She got to a point where she wasn't able to put her wedding rings on anymore. It'd been about a year. Her face looked, in the way that she would describe it, swollen >> [music] >> in all the photos, and so she stopped being in those photos cuz she was embarrassed by how she felt despite how hard she was working.
And so, what did she do? She did what every woman who is the glue does, you know? She's the one who keeps everyone together at work, at home. She doubled down. She was disciplined, you know? Cut out another food group, added a fasting window, extended that fasting window when that wasn't working, and just continued to push harder. But it got so much worse. Like the puffiness just seemed to spread, and it felt like there was this softness all over her body that she just couldn't remove, like this little fat suit, if you want to call it that, that was on top of her actual body.
And now she started noticing that her knees were starting to ache. The 3:00 p.m. crashes got way worse, and she was waking up at 3:00 a.m. despite the fact that she was absolutely exhausted, but her brain just wouldn't shut off for her. So, by the time she found us, she was convinced that nothing else is going to work. She told me, "If this doesn't work, this is my last thing. This is my last thing. I don't know what else to do. This is my last attempt at trying to get my body to respond the way that I want to."
And so, when she started with us, the first 4 weeks we really focused on changing food quality, adding some variety in there. She wasn't eating poorly, but eating a lot of the same things every single day. So, we worked on adding some variety to her plate, and we actually increased her calories a bit as well. And we found that her system started to respond. She wasn't having the crashes in the afternoon anymore. Her sleep was getting better, which was phenomenal. Then we started stabilizing her blood sugar. Then we ran her through our VITA protocol, which is the Vitality Inflammatory and Detox Accelerator. Um, and once she started that, she dropped 10 lb in the 4 weeks that she actually did that protocol, which was crazy. And the puffiness just completely changed her face. Like she felt like herself again. She had way better energy. Her knees didn't feel so achy anymore. It was amazing, and none of this required cutting more food, and it didn't require more exercise. We actually pulled exercise out.
And the reason if you we actually addressed the root cause of her inflammation. And so, I want to be clear about something because when we talk about inflammation, inflammation is not damage. Inflammation is actually supposed to send the signal of repair. And when you cut your finger, for example, when you fight off a cold, when you're recovering from a surgery, when you tear a muscle in the gym, your body is going to flood that area with immune cells and inflammatory signals, which are supposed to clean up, rebuild, and protect you. It's supposed to flare up, do its job, and then switch off. That's called acute inflammation, and we can't live without it. It's very important.
The kind that's actually wrecking your fat loss is different. This is that chronic low-grade inflammation that you can have for years before you start experiencing symptoms. It doesn't flare and resolve. It just smolders quietly everywhere under the surface all of the time. And it's so low-grade that you can't really feel it as inflammation sometimes. It's just like a little bit of puffiness here and there sometimes, stiff joints, some brain fog, struggling with memory, stubborn belly fat, but it's all these things that just slowly gradually start to happen. It doesn't feel as drastic for a lot of people.
For some people, something happens that triggers that inflammatory response, whether it was the pandemic, um, tossing HRT into a body that wasn't ready, and now we see this like massive inflammatory response where it just feels like the weight just sped up out of absolutely nowhere. Super sudden drastic weight gain is usually an inflammatory response like 90% of the time. And so, when we're looking at inflammation, this is this is the one that we're looking at as this this chronic low-grade that's in your body. It's not like this acute that flares up and comes down like it's supposed to.
And so, I want you to think about it like a smoke detector. A working smoke detector screams when there's a real fire, right? You put the fire out, the alarm goes quiet. Perfect. We love that. That's acute inflammation. It's loud, it's useful, and it's temporary. Chronic inflammation is a smoke detector that's been shrieking for 2 years with no fire in sight. After a while, the whole house is built around that alarm, right? The walls vibrate with it. Nothing in the house really works right, not because there's a fire, but because the alarm never stops.
And so, this is where anti-inflammatory everything really isn't fixing anything. Because you can't drown out a stuck alarm with a turmeric latte. It just doesn't work that way. The turmeric isn't wrong. It's just nowhere near strong enough to override an alarm that's been, you know, just going off forever because the rest of your life is triggering it: the blood sugar swings, the short sleep, the chronic stress, poor food quality, the hormone shifts. You're not failing at like a specific protocol, and you're not missing a specific supplement. It's like you're trying to use a teaspoon on a system fire. Like, that doesn't really work.
And so, we need to stop chasing inflammation with just like one food, one supplement. The fire isn't coming from that, you know, lack of one thing. It's coming from a system that just can't switch off, and that's what we're trying to calm when we're doing all these things with our clients.
So, let me show you exactly how this stalls fat loss. Because you need to understand the mechanism, so then when we give you the answers of how to address this, it makes so much more sense, and it's easier to do. Cuz if you tell me to do something I don't understand why, I personally am never going to do it cuz I don't like, it doesn't make sense. There's not enough understanding on my part.
And so, when we are looking at fat burning, to burn fat, your body has to be able to access that fat. And that depends on a hormone called insulin. Insulin's job is to move sugar out of your blood and into your cells. And when insulin is working well, and it settles back down between your meals, your body can dip into fat for fuel. Good. This is what we want.
But chronic inflammation jams that system. The same inflammatory signals that are smoldering in the background are physically interfering with how your cells respond to insulin. That's insulin resistance. So, picture insulin as a key and your cells as the door that the key is supposed to open. Inflammation is like someone jamming gum into every single lock. The key is still there, insulin, but it can't get in and can't turn. So, the sugar can't get in. It backs up in your bloodstream, your body panics and goes, "We need to get rid of this. This is not safe," and sends even more keys cuz it thinks that the keys is the problem. But, the issue is not the insulin. It's not the keys. It's that you can't get the key into the lock. And so, again, cutting out carbs doesn't fix this problem. It doesn't take the gum out of the lock. And that's what you want to improve when we're talking about blood sugar, which I did a whole podcast on that just a few episodes ago. I'll make sure the link is in the show notes for you guys.
And so, here's the part that matters when we're talking about all these keys accumulating in your bloodstream is that insulin is a storage hormone. When insulin is high, as long as there's lots of keys in your bloodstream, your body's instruction is to store. Always, every single time. The jammed lock doesn't just block sugar. It like nails the fat door shut, so your body never gets told, "Hey, let's burn the fat that we have." So, you can't access the fat in your body for fuel because insulin is high for too long. And this is part of the reason of this is is inflammation is jamming the lock. Again, this is not a carbohydrate problem. This is uh, we need to fix the lock problem by removing inflammation, making those levels lower, so that key can go in and let sugars in. And now you can have carbs again, and it's fantastic.
Then, there is also a second hormone called leptin. And I did a whole deep dive on leptin on previous podcast. I'll make sure the show notes has that link for you guys. But, basically, the second hormone that we're going to talking about, leptin, your fat cells release to tell your brain, "Hey, we've got plenty of energy stored. You can stop eating and burn fat freely." Chronic inflammation basically cuts the cord, so you don't get that signal at all. So, the tank is full, but the dashboard reads empty. So, your brain never gets told, "Hey, we have enough. We can burn." And so, it keeps thinking that you need more energy. And so, it slows down your metabolism to conserve. It doesn't want your body to burn calories because it thinks that you don't have enough because that leptin is cut. So, you could actually still have adequate leptin levels, but inflammation is going to block your brain from hearing that signal.
And this is where we also see increased hunger in a lot of people, where the cravings get so intense in the afternoon that it's almost embarrassing because you are a disciplined person. You get stuff done. You want to be in control, and it feels like these cravings are driving you. This is part of the problem, as well. It's a fuel gauge where that wire is cut, so your brain is never told you actually have enough. So, insulin is going to tell your body to store. Your brain doesn't hear the leptin, so it thinks it's starving and is never told to burn. And so, are you seeing where the problem is here? This is what we mean when we say your fat-burning pathways are blocked. The math isn't mathing because the wiring is broken, not the buttons.
So, the fix here is that you can't out-diet a jammed lock. Is improving your nutritional quality going to help here? Absolutely. But, there are a lot of factors that we're going to go into.
>> [clears throat] >>
The fix here that I want you guys to understand is that you can't out-diet a jammed lock. Like, you cannot drop your calories to fix this problem. It's not going to suddenly make your body good at burning calories. That doesn't happen. The inflammation still has to come down, so insulin can come down, and so leptin can actually tell your brain that it's good, that you're fine, and that you can burn fat for fuel.
Now, I want to tie in why this is hitting you so much harder now than it did at like your 20s and maybe early 30s. Because for 30 years, you had a built-in fire suppression system running quietly in the background, and her name is estrogen. Estrogen is one of your body's most powerful natural anti-inflammatory regulators. It keeps your immune system signaling calm. It helps your cells stay sensitive to insulin, so they're not getting jammed as easily. And it was managing the alarm system the entire time, and you never had to think about it, which was great. She was like the best employee you have ever had.
And in perimenopause, estrogen doesn't just decline, she [snorts] is a little bit wild. Sometimes we have a lot, sometimes we have none. And then in postmenopause, she completely bottoms out. She's gone. She has left, she's retired, left the building. And so, when estrogen leaves, that anti-inflammatory brake leaves with it. And so, estrogen was kind of like the sprinkler system in the ceiling of the building, and for 30 years, any little spark got handled before you even smelled smoke. And then, once our estrogen started declining, we lost that. Postmenopause, that sprinkler system just shuts off completely. And you didn't get the memo. And so, we're in the same building, same sparks, but now every single one of them is actually catching fire, and it stays lit. And so, your fire suppression just went offline. This is where we need to be so much more aware of what's driving inflammation because we need to decrease the sparks, cuz we were getting away with it before. Now estrogen's gone, we have to deal with this now. It's not optional.
And so, here's where it kind of sucks is that when estrogen drops, your body is also going to change where you store fat. It's going to move it off of your hips and thighs and park it right on the belly. Fantastic. And it's going to store it as visceral fat as well, which is not just quiet padding. It's actually an active gland that pumps out its own inflammatory signals. So, now you've lost your anti-inflammatory hormone estrogen, and that excess fat storage is going to increase inflammation even more. And we know estrogen already helps with insulin sensitivity, so when that decreases, it's like the locks already can't open with the keys, they're already jammed, the inflammation and lack of estrogen just jam it even more.
And so, this is where we need to really understand, okay, there's multiple things here that are happening that are causing our body to become more inflamed, that are causing our body to push ourselves into a storage state, and just eating less doesn't fix any of this. It never will. This is why you're going to continue to diet and diet and diet and never get results because this isn't an overeating calorie problem. This is what is my body doing internally with the food that I am consuming. What are the signals that are being sent out? And for many of us, this is pushing us into a fat storage state. It's blocking our fat-burning pathways. It's making building muscle really freaking hard. And so, this is your body sucks at burning calories, to put it bluntly, because the environment that it's operating in right now has completely changed. But no one gave you the manual. You're still trying to follow the old manual with a completely different system, and that doesn't work.
And so, let me piece this together because once you see this loop more clearly, you're going to understand why this working harder has been backfiring. Inflammation blocks insulin. High insulin stores fat, especially in the belly. Belly fat's going to pump out more inflammation. More inflammation blocks insulin more. You go round and round and round, and then we have to add in the fact that now also your body doesn't get that leptin response.
Then, the other things that we usually reach to, you know, fix this problem is going to make things worse. The slashing calories, the adding lots of extra exercise is just raising cortisol, our stress hormone. And cortisol raises inflammation, inflammation raises cortisol. So, if we're hammering daily on hit, a body that is already inflamed and under recovered and under eating, oh my gosh, just more and more cortisol. More fire. More fire happening. Inflammation just continues to come back up.
And then we try skipping meals, we try fasting or doing longer fast, we're eating less food or putting more effort in, we're waking up earlier and sacrificing sleep to go exercise. And then also in this time of our life, we're dealing with a lot of financial changes, too, of like trying to support our kids as they go off to university, perhaps, or maybe we're looking at retiring, empty nesters, maybe some of us are, you know, having kids later in life, we've got toddlers at home, which is equally stressful in a different way, we're maybe peaking in our careers, taking care of sick and dying parents. I've been there and done that, too, and you know, that's already raising our cortisol, too. And so, if our estrogen is low, we're going to see this get so much worse, way more inflammation, way harder to lose fat. The harder you cut, the worse you're going to make things.
So, this is why I will never tell you to just try harder. Because a body that is on fire does not need more pressure. It just needs the fire put out. That's step number one. Then, and only then, will a calorie deficit actually work for your body. Because your effort has never been the problem. You are a person who works freaking hard. You try really hard. That's not the problem. The problem is the order that you're trying to do things in. We have to bring inflammation down first, then your body will finally cooperate and provide you with the outcomes that you're expecting with the effort that you're putting in. Otherwise, this will not happen for you.
So, how do we actually put out this fire? This is a sequence most women try to skip all the way to number five first and wonder why nothing happens. And so, this is the very thing that we do in our coaching program. This is why we have these strategic phases where we kind of reset your body so that the signaling is correct, there's no interference so that when we go into a fat loss phase, it's simple, it's effective, and you actually see the results that you want. But the issue is most people don't want to go through the first four steps before they can actually get to fat loss. And so, they're going to just continue to get frustrated and push really hard and not get the results that they're looking for.
So, step number one is calm the system first. We need to address cortisol. Cortisol is a puppeteer master who controls everything in your body. Higher cortisol, worse blood sugar, more insulin resistance, tanks your hormone production, so hormonal symptoms get way worse. Bloating gets worse cuz digestion slows down, we get more constipated, we see inflammation drives up, our energy gets worse, our brain fog gets worse, our sleep gets worse, which is going to make insulin resistance and inflammation even worse as well. It slows down your thyroids, your body's getting worse at burning calories. And so, we need to address cortisol. Because if you don't, nothing else is going to work for you. And we see this in women every single freaking time in our program. It's the conversation we have on our free consult calls all of the time.
So, calming the system first, how do we do this? We need to do a few different things. So, one is protecting your sleep. And I've seen comments where people are like, "I know my sleep sucks and I know it's preventing me from being able to lose weight, but I don't know how to fix it." Okay, let's talk about it. Let's deal with that right now.
So, to improve your sleep, what we want to do is A, make sure you get to bed earlier, which nobody wants to hear and it sucks and everyone's like that's generic advice. You get better, deeper sleep in the hours before midnight than afterwards. So, we want to make sure we're getting enough sleep. We want to be in bed for a minimum of 8 hours. We can't get enough sleep otherwise. We want to make sure we're sleeping in a dark room, that it's cool. Some white noise can help. Avoiding screens before bed. Right now, one of my clients is reading her Bible before bed. Um, and she has had way better sleep, way easier time falling asleep, which has been fantastic cuz that's bringing down her nervous system, we're lowering her heart rate, her breathing rate, keeping her grounded, lowering her blood pressure right before bed.
Other things that you can do is lay on your bed with your feet up on the wall. So, you're making like an L shape with your body. This slows down your heart rate and your breathing rate and your blood pressure, which will all take you out of that fight or flight high cortisol state and bring you into that rest and digest portion of your nervous system that we need for cortisol to come back down. Doing that for 5 to 10 minutes, if you compare that with deep breathing, even better.
Finding micro moments of rest throughout your day. This is so underrated. It is so free and people would rather do way more complicated, way more expensive things than just taking 30 seconds before they're done at the end of their work day to just sit here and take some slow, deep breaths. 4 seconds in, hold for 4 seconds, out for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds. Doing that for 30 seconds before you leave work. 30 seconds before you get out of your car. 30 seconds before you go for lunch. Those small micro moments of actively lowering your breathing rate and your heart rate are the things that are going to remind your body, "Hey, we don't have to live up here. Let's bring it down here again." Those things help.
Getting outside in the sunlight, massively beneficial for lowering cortisol. Spending time in nature. >> [snorts] >> Um, being, you know, hydrated. Dehydration dries up inflammation and stress in your body. So, hydrating is actually very important. Um, these are things like for me, I spend time in my Bible. I do a devotional every morning. Um, I do my reading plan from She Reads Truth. A few of you had asked where I get that from. She Reads Truth, my favorite. I finished Genesis not that long ago and it was fantastic. Highly recommend. Um, no affiliate there. I just genuinely super love them. Um, I do that while I'm wearing my red light therapy panel on my belly to help bring inflammation down as well and just like double down on bringing that cortisol down.
Um, being creative helps bring cortisol down because if we are in a high fight or flight state, we can't be creative. Our body is wired for survival. If we actively do things that are creative, it forces us into that rest and digest portion of your nervous system. This might look like an adult coloring book, a paint by numbers, a crocheting, cross-stitching, knitting. Um, this might be just, you know, listening to music. Maybe you're playing music. Maybe you're humming. Maybe you're singing. All of those things that are more creative-based are going to help pull you out of that fight or flight state. Um, there are so many things that you can do to bring cortisol down. You can't out-adaptogen and supplement your way out of this if your lifestyle is just perpetrating it. It's not going to work. It's not going to make a difference. You want to This is like wearing a bulletproof vest versus taking the ammo out of a gun. What's going to make the biggest difference? Taking the ammo out of the gun. That's the answer here.
Okay, so that's the foundation that you have to do, that you have to focus on. This also is where we have to create boundaries, which is the hardest thing for women cuz we want to do everything and then some. Um, this is also where we are, you know, saying no to things, protecting our time. Just because there's not something scheduled in your calendar doesn't mean that you're available. That's a huge thing that we have to remind ourselves. These are all foundational pieces that need to be in place to be able to bring that cortisol down. The last one I do want to mention here is the urgency. I caught myself when I was doing my hair in the morning. I'm brushing my hair furiously, like why? Putting on my makeup super rushed, like why? Like pay attention to how you do the little things throughout the day. You will realize or there's like this low-level urgency that you're always at. We need to change that. So, actively slowing those things down, make those little things more enjoyable, slower, mindful. It's going to be really hard to do because we're all just programmed to like go go go fast-paced all the time.
Step number two is steady your blood sugar. So, cortisol makes your blood sugar stability way worse. So, if we don't fix cortisol first, addressing blood sugar can be really challenging for a lot of people because cortisol is still going to make you insulin resistant. And so, why we want to address blood sugar when we're talking about inflammation is that every single blood sugar spike and then crash that we have is a small inflammatory event on your body. And you are having these all of the time.
So, some of the best things that you can do to help support your blood sugar are going to be stop eating, stop skipping your breakfast, and start eating your breakfast. 30 g of protein first thing in the morning. Make sure there's carbohydrates in there as well. Ideally some fruit. I love encouraging women to have fruit in the morning with their breakfast. Lots of anti-inflammatory nutrients in there. And lots of fiber as well. And so, the reason that we want to have breakfast is that if we don't, cuz cortisol wakes us up in the morning, which is good, we want that, but it's supposed to come down. When we don't eat breakfast, our body goes, "Uh, we need energy. We don't have any energy coming in. How are we going to do today?" It cortisol goes up, tells your liver to dump sugar into your bloodstream, and your insulin comes up. And so, over time if you're always doing this, it will make you insulin resistant. We see this happen to women all the time. Fasting is not a long-term thing. This is where we want to use it appropriately and strategically for short period of time because otherwise you're teaching your body not to use food for fuel. This happens a lot. This is why a lot of women do not feel hungry in the morning cuz you have trained your body to not use food for fuel, to not need food. And so, therefore when you do eat food, your body's going to store the majority of it as fat. And so, we want to make sure that you are actually feeding and teaching your body, "Hey, here is food. We use this for energy." That is what you want. Cuz otherwise your body sucks at burning calories and then you're stuck. And we don't want that.
So, make sure you're having breakfast within like 90 minutes of waking. Don't let yourself fall into that like 3:00 p.m. crash by making sure that you're having meals like every 3 to 5 hours apart. Ideally, I love four. Three's a little bit close for me. Again, it depends on your blood sugar stabilities. If your blood sugar stability is pretty poor, we're going to see like pretty drastic drops in between and we need to address that. And so, having your meals like 4 hours apart, balanced meal, protein, carbohydrate, fat, get some veggies or fruit in there. Super important. Making sure you're eating the majority of your veggies or protein first. So, your body digests that food a little bit more slowly and you don't have as big of a blood sugar spike. You're going to see that your blood sugar rises slowly, maintains, then comes back down. It's like at a nice stable lower level. That's where fat burning happens. But if you're snacking all day, your insulin never comes down. Even if you're not eating much, that insulin stays up, your body never gets told to burn fat. And so, that's why you want to have those nice big balanced meals that keep us fuller for longer so that we're not struggling with our blood sugar in between. It's low enough that insulin isn't high and that we're able to see fat burning happen in between.
Um, next thing is: So that first one was lowering cortisol. Step two was stabilizing blood sugar. Now we're calling it feed the fire crew, don't starve it. So, your body needs raw materials to lower inflammation and to repair. Restriction takes those resources away. So, we want to make sure that we're actively giving our body the nutrients that it needs to be able to actually calm your body. Cuz when you don't, it freaks out, goes, "Hey, we don't have what we need." Boom, cortisol and inflammation go up. Blood sugar goes with it. Not a good place to be.
And so, we want to make sure that we are having adequate omega-3 rich foods in your diet. These can be tougher to um, get in your diet, right? So, a lot of women I do recommend supplementing. Um, we want to make sure that we're having a rainbow of colorful plants in your body, in your nutrition. Because these are going to be rich in polyphenols, which are very high in antioxidants. They can actually really help with your inflammation, provide you with lots of fiber and micronutrients that our body needs to be able to bring that inflammation down, and also for your body to just function properly.
And so, when we're looking at these, the best way to do it is just rotate your fruit every couple of days. So, for us, we go to Costco, we buy like whatever fruit we want for the week. So, this past week we did nectarines, strawberries, and blueberries. Next week we'll do maybe kiwis, pears, and something else. Great way to change up the variety in your colors and the micronutrients that you're getting. Then same with veggies. We roast different pan of veggies every single week. Sometimes it's a bunch of cauliflower and carrots, sometimes it's a bunch of broccoli and zucchini. Um, maybe we'll do like more like fajita style stuff, so it'll be like peppers and onions, and those will go into wraps, onto bowls, on the side of your meals, on top of rice, whatever you want it to be. But this is a great way to just rotate through things without overthinking it. Super simple. We tend to overcomplicate that. Um, and then we want to also make sure that we're getting enough protein in our diet to be able to build. If cuz if we aren't able to repair, we don't have enough protein to repair things, inflammation is going to stay up, and we definitely do not want that. So, I like to add before taking away.
Then, we move on to movement, and we want to move to drain, not to punish. And so, what I mean by this is the right movement in your day can be an incredibly powerful antioxidant experience for you, anti-inflammatory experience for you. The wrong dose of exercise or activity is going to add cortisol and adds fans to the flame. So, let's change [clears throat] that.
Number four is move to drain, not to punish. And so, what I mean by this is the right kind of activity for the right duration, the right frequency over a week can be wonderfully anti-inflammatory. But, the wrong dose or too high of an intensity, too often, too long can just amplify inflammation drastically. For me, myself, I cannot work out more than 4 days in a week. It's not good for me. My body gets inflamed incredibly quick. It cannot recover. If I am working out 4 days a week, it's 2 days, one break, 2 days, and then 2 days off. Because what happens is when you are working out, that is an inflammatory response on your body. You break down the tissue, and like we mentioned, when there's things that need to be repaired, fluid and inflammation, all those signaling go to the site, the bicep, for example, to help it build up and repair. But, if we are never having adequate recovery in between, that inflammation stays high. And so then, you're not only not able to repair because too much inflammation actually is going to impede your ability to be able to repair muscle mass and build muscle mass, you're going to hold on to a ton of fluid. You are going to feel puffy and inflamed.
I will never forget one of our clients, um, incredible. She was a crossfitter, working out like crazy amounts. Like, I can't even tell you. I don't think I've ever heard of someone working out as hard as she did. And she did not want to give back her exercises. She was terrified that like if she did, that would be the thing that would just like pile up the weight gain. She managed to stop the weight gain and could not get rid of it despite working out so hard and like doing a lot of the right things. And she was scared that if she stopped exercising, she would see like this exponential growth on the scale again. And so, after a couple months of convincing her only doing walking, we did a month or two of like no actual lifting. It was just walking and mobility. By the end of our 6-month program, so she did 2 months of like no exercise, walking, mobility, then we added in like 3 days a week of resistance training. She lost 30 lbs over her time with us. This is over like 6 to 8 months. And we didn't drop her calories ever. All we did was change what was driving her inflammation, which was an inability to recover, and just working out too much. So, we pulled back her exercise, made sure we were giving her enough nutrition, pulling down the stress cuz the exercise was part of that stress response, focusing on her sleep, providing her body with the nutrients that she needed. We actually increased her calories. And her body completely transformed. But this is the thing that women are the least willing to sacrifice in the short term to be able to then get back into a muscle-building state. Because right now they're not in a muscle-building state. They're so hyper-inflamed.
And so, when we're looking at movement, we're looking at daily walking, light movement. [clears throat] You can use like a vibration plate. I have one. I love it to help move lymph around cuz if we're sitting all the time, things just stay stagnant and our lymph can't detox. And so then we get more inflammation that way. So, getting up regularly to move, whether it's just going to grab some water on your break, and going for a quick few laps around the office, you know, going to the furthest bathroom in your building, whatever that might be, standing up doing 15 squats like every hour. Things like that can actually help a lot. Strength training like two to four days a week, following a progressive overload program, making sure there's adequate recovery between muscle groups. Um, stop hammering on the hip. Decreasing that cardio temporarily to, you know, relax that hyper-inflamed system. And then we can start incorporating things if you do love cardio. That's totally fine. It's not a removal forever. It's just a temporary removal so that when you do do it, it doesn't completely make you feel terrible. It doesn't affect your body composition. That it actually makes you feel good in the right way. Movement is designed if it's properly designed for your body, it is going to look different for some people. But the right programming can be fantastic. Just because it makes you sweaty, just because it's challenging, just because, you know, gets your heart rate up really high, does not mean it's effective. Especially if you're someone who's feeling puffy, got achy joints, you're struggling with sleep, you're not eating that much, that exercise is actually not going to serve you. It's probably actually going to work against you. And that's a really hard concept for people to wrap their head around.
So, once we address those four things: cortisol first, blood sugar, we are feeding ourselves properly, moving the right way, then we can get into a strategic deficit if it's even needed. For some women, we don't even have to go there because all of this what it was what was preventing your body from responding. And so then we go into a strategic deficit, we drop our calories. I like to drop moderately at first, and then see how your body responds. Some people might need to, you know, do a little carb cycling. Some people might have to do a shorter fat loss phase. For me, I get down. I do it for like four to six weeks. I have to come out for a couple weeks because if I stay there too long, boom, inflammation goes up. I'm no longer sleeping. I'm up 7 lbs. It happened the last time I did it. Happens every single time cuz I'm like, maybe this time I could go longer. Nope. Every single time it ends up being too much for my body and I get inflamed, bloated, and I start gaining weight in that calorie deficit. For some people it might look like 2 weeks in a fat loss phase and then like 2 to 3 days of a refeeding coming back down. It really depends on each specific person, your past dieting history, what your lifestyle is like, how reactive your body is, is it going to react poorly and like get inflamed more easily. Any auto autoimmune conditions that you might have, where your hormones are at. There's so many factors that dictate what that fat loss phase looks like. Um, and so unfortunately I don't have like a start here because it is so different and it is determined by how your body responds and multiple other factors.
And so, when we do go into this fat loss phase, we want to be protein-led. We want to make sure our protein stays high. We want to make sure there's a structure that we want to get in and out as quickly as possible without slowing your metabolism back down. That is the number one goal. People start seeing results, they stay there too long, then they plateau, now their metabolism has slowed down with it, and now it makes coming out of that fat loss phase very hard or seeing further results. And so, we don't want to stay there for a long time. We want to get in and get out, get your body recovered, and then go back down if we need to. Some people have to go through a few fat loss phases and that's fine. We want to make sure that we aren't causing your body to suck at burning calories again after working so hard to fix that. So, you could have like the same deficit that you were doing before and actually get results this time because your body is walking into that deficit in a completely different state, which is the whole point.
And so, I want to remind you like you can't out-supplement your way out of this. The fire isn't in like any one supplement that you're missing or like it's one specific food that you're missing. It's a whole system where that switch is just [music] stuck on. It never turns off. And we need to untangle which part is driving yours and actually look under the hood. That's exactly what we do when we start with someone. We go through a root cause discovery phase, and this includes six different health assessments where we're assessing so many things in your health history, all of your symptoms, [music] pairing that with a Dutch complete test so we can see where your cortisol is throughout the day. Is it high? Is it low? Is it high because your body's creating a lot of cortisol, or is it cuz your body's not going to breaking it down? We can look at your detox systems. Is your body detoxing well? If it's not, that's driving up inflammation for sure. And so, we can look and see what is the main driver for you and get hyper specific on addressing that so that we can get to where you want to be quicker. Doesn't mean it's going to be a super fast progress. It means it's going to be way quicker than if you don't just address the root cause right away.
Then we build out that custom VITA protocol, the Vitality Inflammatory and Detox Accelerator, and that's customized to each person to again focus on lowering inflammation, supporting your liver, fueling your cells, stabilizing your blood sugar, lowering your cortisol so that your body is in a state where it can burn fat again, where it can burn calories, where it can create energy so you're not exhausted. So that insulin doesn't stay up all the time because the doors are locked, right? So they're not jammed anymore. And this is why we can see women lose up to 10 lb in the 4-week in that VITA because we're addressing the issues that are driving up that inflammation in the first place. We don't have to add exercise. We don't have to drop calories. It's fantastic. Your body isn't just asking for more pressure. It's asking for less fire. That's a very different story.
>> [music] >>
Stable blood sugar, real sleep, enough food, inflammation down.
>> [music] >>
It's asking to be cared for instead of punished. Your body was made to heal, not fight a fire forever.
And if you have no idea where to start, whether it's I have no idea how much to eat, am I getting enough protein, am I getting enough carbohydrates, what's driving my stress up, what's driving my inflammation up, I have no idea, am I working out the right way for my body right now, book a free 15-minute consultation call. There's no strings attached, it's not a sales call. All we're doing is taking in all the information you put on your intake form, so make sure you put lots, and we will help you figure out some custom guidelines to get moving on your own. Because to figure out your nutritional needs is not just age, height, weight, and activity level.
>> [music] >>
It is based on your hormones, your symptoms, your past dieting history, the kind of exercise you do, not just how much. Are you sleeping well? How's your digestion? There are so many factors [music] that are going to influence what your body actually needs, and no online calculator is going to do that for you, which is why we offer these free 15-minute calls. They do book out pretty far in advance because it is a free thing that we want to keep free for everyone. So, definitely, if you're thinking about it, try and book sooner than later. I will see you [music] on the next episode. I love you so much, and I will talk to you soon. Bye.