← BETTER! with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Strength, Body Composition & Perimenopause
BETTER! with Dr. Stephanie Estima | Strength, Body Composition & Perimenopause
Why Your Body Composition Isn't Changing (And It's Not What You Think)
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Why does your body stop changing even when you're doing everything "right"? In this solo episode, Dr. Stephanie breaks down the real reasons body composition plateaus and why the scale is lying to you. She explains the science of muscle protein breakdown, why carbs are essential for building, and gives you three shifts to make this week. Watch the full episode at https://youtu.be/5j0uhZzLAlw
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I train five days a week, I track my macros, I hit my protein, I sleep eight hours a day. And at this point in my life, I'm so frustrated because my body has not changed in eight months. Like not an inch, not a pound. And I feel like I'm doing everything I was told and my body is just not listening. It stopped listening. Because the absence of hunger after prolonged restriction is not your body being fine with less. It's your body adapting to survive on less, which is a very, very different thing. That's not just imperfect, but it's literally working against the very, your, your own biology, right? The thing, the thing that you actually want, which is curves and muscle and a body that you can trust, it actually destroys that. So when I say that muscle is the variable that changes everything, I'm not being motivational. I'm, I'm, I'm literally. It literally changes everything. Everything downstream of it gets better when you have more of it, and it gets worse when you don't. You are quite literally cannibalizing the tissue that you're trying to build in order to compensate for not eating enough fuel that your tissue needs. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of better with Dr. Stephanie. It's me, your host, Dr. Dr. Stephanie Estima. And today it's you and me. We're gonna be talking a lot about body composition and why you have been putting in all the effort, doing all the things, and you're still not seeing the results that you want. We're gonna be going through reasons why that's happening. Betty's sleep is not a recovery strategy. It is the recovery strategy. And if you are waking up at 3am running hot, or lying there with your brain doing its little highlight reel of everything that you forgot to that day. This is your nervous system stuck in output mode because nothing in your evening told you that the day was over. Okay? Cortisol should be at its lowest point when you're trying to sleep. And for a lot of women in midlife, it really isn't. The rhythm is really off. The wind down signal never comes. This is where peaks Vesper Blend is built for that exact window. It has ashwagandha to bring cortisol down, magnesium to support the nervous system into rest, Reishi for deep recovery. It's the clinical case for an evening ritual in a single cup. I make it about 45 minutes or so before bed, and it becomes a signal that my body recognizes that, hey, we're done for the day. And then I head into my, you know, skincare routine. And that permission to stop performing and starting to calm down is not a small thing. If you want to redefine your evening ritual and feel like yourself the next day, you can get 10% off for life. Yes, that's for life@peaklife.com better. That's P I Q U E L l I f e.com better. Your nervous system will thank you. Your 3am Wake up is not a guarantee. Right. So let's give your nervous system something to work with. I wanted to start off our conversation today with a DM that I received a couple weeks ago. And honestly, I have not been able to stop thinking about it. And I'll read it to you close to exactly how she wrote it, because I think that I. I don't think I could improve on it. It perfectly captures what we're going to talk about today. So this woman DMed me, I don't know her, she's not a client, and she wrote something like, I feel like I'm losing my mind. I train five days a week. I track my macros, I hit my protein. I sleep eight hours a day. And at this point in my life, it feels like a small miracle. I eat clean, I don't drink. And I'm so frustrated because my body has not changed in eight months. Like not an inch, not a pound. And I feel like I'm doing everything I was told and my body is just not listening. It's stopped listening. And honestly, that DM is the reason why I'm doing this solo episode today. I sat with that message for such a long time before I answered her. Because here's, here's the thing. I know she's not lazy. Right? This is not a discipline problem. Right? She is not, you know, missing willpower. This is a woman, probably like you, who is doing the hardest, the most disciplined version of everything, right? That, you know, many people are never even gonna attempt, right? She's going five days a week, she's tracking her macros, eight hours of sleep. You know, she's protecting it. Like, you know, we always say, like, protect it like you're paid to sleep, like you're paid to. And nothing that she's wanting to see is moving. Okay? So what I want her to know and what I want you to know if you are in a similar boat, is that her body actually is listening. It's not that it stopped listening. It's been listening this entire time. So your body has been listening this entire time. You've just been giving it potentially the wrong instructions. And honestly, you could stop right now because that's the episode, okay? That is what we're gonna talk about over the next 40 to 45 minutes, right? But I wanna actually, I want to go into some of the nuance. I mean, it's a nice quote to put on a. On a coaster or something, but I really want you to understand this in your bones, right? Pun fully intended. I'm totally foreshadowing there. By the time we're done, I want you to understand what the instructions that you're doing are potentially incorrect, and what are some of the ways that we can actually make it right. And before we get into solutions, though, I do want to just stay here for a moment. I do want to just stay here in the frustration for a minute, because I think that a lot of us don't sit in that French frustration long enough. We just rush to fix it. We say, oh, problem. Oh, I'm gaining weight. Oh, something. And we rush to fix it. And I think that the rushing piece is maybe why so many women feel so frantic, maybe, and so alone in this. So let me just say maybe the quiet part out loud, maybe the thing that you felt but probably haven't said to anyone because you're embarrassed by how much it sounds like you're complaining about maybe a problem that other people would love to have. But let me just say this, my friend. I see you. You are doing everything right, even though you feel like your body is not moving. You've done the calorie, the caloric deficit, you've done the cardio, probably more of it than what you should, but we'll get into that. And somewhere along the way, you learned that more was the answer when less stopped working. So you've weighed your food, you've done more, right? You've weighed yourself every day. You've stood on that damn scale first thing in the morning, right after peeing before drinking water, because you read somewhere that that was the accurate way to do it. I mean, as if your worth needed to be measured on a scale anyway, you know, we all know my feelings about scales. They are just a measure of your relationship with gravity. But even still, you're using the scale, and the scale doesn't move right. Or worse, worse, it moves in the wrong direction. And you don't know why. You can't explain why, because you haven't done anything different, right? I want to name something else because I think that underneath all of this, and nobody says it, you know, directly enough, this isn't just about a body composition. Plateau. This is about trust, okay? You have built a working theory of your own body. If you eat less and move more, you get smaller. And maybe that worked. Maybe that worked for some years, maybe decades, and now it doesn't. And now when the operating system that you've trusted since you were a teenager suddenly stops producing results, or in my case, since I was, like 10, stops producing results, it doesn't just feel like a plateau anymore. It feels like a betrayal.
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It feels like you're losing a negotiation with your own flesh. You know, and because we've lived in a culture that has taught women, you know, approximately since the moment that we hit puberty, that our worth is loosely correlated or directly correlated with the number on a scale that there is, you know, pride in a certain size on a dress, on a tag on the back of your shirt or back of your dress. You know, this isn't a neutral data point. It's not like you're. It's not like your car is not starting right? It's much closer. It's much closer to grief. I've had countless patients. A few have described their stories in my upcoming book, and maybe you'll see yourself here, too. And these patients have sat across from me on my treatment tables in my intake rooms, many in tears, saying something along the lines of, I hate looking at myself in the mirror. I hate my body. I'm disgusted with myself. I have heard that. I mean, I have said those things to myself, you know, just in the vein of transparency and honesty. But I've also heard it from too many women. And these are the women who are, you know, they're training, they're lifting weights, they're doing Pilates, they're eating the way that they've always eaten. That worked. And then, bam, Something, you know, something stops working and £15 comes on seemingly overnight. So if that's you, my dear Betty, my dear friend, my dear listener, and you're exhausted by trying, maybe you're resentful of the lack of outcome with the effort, like your effort and outcome are not correlating. Or maybe you're even just convinced that you're one of those women who has a broken metabolism. I need you to hear what I'm about to say before we go any further, okay? And that is, I promise you, with all of my heart and everything that I know about science and everything that I've perused in the literature, you need to hear that your body is not broken and you are not the problem that you think you are. What you are is A woman who is handed the wrong map and told it was the only map that exists. So let's burn that mother effing map. Okay? And let's talk about who did this and most importantly, what you're going to do about it. You know what nobody told me when I started lifting? That the workout isn't actually the hard part. The recovery is. Your joints are doing the invisible work between sessions. Your tendons, ligaments, and connective tissue holding the whole system together. That's your infrastructure. And most of us have spent years ignoring it entirely. This is where incrediwear comes in. I wear their elbow sleeve when I'm playing tennis, their knee sleeves when I'm school squatting, and when I recover. They're not just compression sleeves. The technology here is different. The fabric woven into them increases the circulation to the tissue, which means that your body is actively repairing between sessions, not just waiting to feel better. That means that you are going to feel less stiffness, you're gonna have faster recovery. Your joints are going to actually keep up with the work that you're asking them to do. Now, of course, muscle is the engine, but your joints are, are the road. Okay? Take care of the road. Whether you're an athlete dealing with chronic joint pain or just somebody who wants to feel better in your body today, this is worth trying. Head over to doctorstephenestima.com incrediware and use code DrSteff20. For 20% off your order, that's drstephaniestima.com incrediware use code Dr. Steph20. That's D, R, S, T, E, P, H20. Most women think muscle health starts with protein. Now don't get me wrong, I love my protein. But muscle health is more than protein. It's more than creatine or any single workout that you do. Because underneath all of these behaviors are your mitochondria, which are these little cellular powerhouses that power every rep, every lift, and every adaptation that your body makes. The reality is, is that our mitochondrial fun declines as we age. And if you're someone who cares about building strength, maintaining muscle, and staying active for decades, mitochondrial health deserves your attention. This is where adding metapure from timeline to your supplement stack can come in. MIT Pure is the only pure and patented form of urolithin A. It is supported by multiple placebo controlled human trials and it works by activating something called mitophagy. This is your body's natural cellular cleanup process and it helps renew aging mitochondria and Support. Support healthier cellular function and increase muscle strength by up to 12% after four months of use. So here's how I think about it. Protein is important because it helps provide the building blocks. Creatine supports power, and mitopure helps support the cellular engines that power both of those things. If you're serious about building the body you want today as well as the one you're going to need tomorrow, this is a supplement worth knowing about. Support your cells and how you age with mitrepure gummies from Timeline. Head over to timeline.com better and save 20% off of your mitrepure gummies. That's timeline.com forward/better. I think it's useful to name. We'll call it a villain. I don't think it's. I don't think it's useful to be angry at, like, a vague, faceless, like diet culture. And I want to name the actual claims specifically because specific villains are the ones that you can actually def. If I just say, oh, diet culture did this. The patriarchy did this, even though it did. We want. We don't want vague villains, okay? Because that's just going to make you tired and exhausted. You don't really know what to do with that. So the exact belief system that the fitness and wellness industry has installed in nearly every woman that I have ever treated, coached, or spoken to, including myself, is. Is out. Is, like, just plain wrong and outdated. Let's go through the claims first. The body composition change, right? So body composition change means weight loss. That's the first lie, okay? Because everybody talks about losing weight. Nobody talks about what weight we want to hold on to and what weight we actually want to build versus what we want to lose. This is one of the foundational lies. This is one of the specific villains. And almost everything else that we're going to talk about today is built on top of that, right? Because weight loss and fat loss are being used as interchangeable words in your head right now, and they are not even close to the same thing. All. And I've said this before, I'll say it again. I know I've already said it on this show. Weight on the scale is a measurement of your relationship with gravity, okay? It is gravity acting on your total mass at one single moment in time. That's it, Betty. That's it. That's all a scale is doing. It cannot distinguish between a pound of fat and a pound of muscle. It cannot tell you how much water you're holding because you trained legs yesterday, by the way. I trained legs yesterday and today I'm heavier, like three. Sometimes like I'm, I'm up by about four pounds today, but usually it's something like three to six pounds. It's completely normal, by the way, completely temporary because your muscles are pulling in fluid to repair themselves. That's just what happens after you train. The weight on the scale cannot tell you whether you're dehydrated, whether you're in the middle of your cycle, whether you've had sushi last night and you had more sodium than you than you realized, right? It's just measuring the most volatile and least informative number about you. Dare I say the weight on the scale is the least important piece about you. And we have built an entire multi billion with a b billion dollar industry around convincing you that that's the only number that matters. The number on the scale, the size on the dress, right? So here's the part that I would like you to be angry about. You don't have to be, but you can just be, you can be indignant about two women, you and I, let's say we can weigh the exact same, we can both get on the scale butt naked after we pee at before we drink, et cetera, exact same number on the scale and have completely different bodies, right? One may have lost 5 pounds of muscle and gained 5 pounds of fat and the scale says nothing's changed. Right? Her mirror, her clothes, her energy and her metabolism are all screaming that something has changed for the worse. And this is where I will say that the scale is often like fundamentally useless in telling you which woman you are, because you could be the woman who's lost five pounds of fat and gained five pounds of muscle. Scale doesn't change. Or the scale has said same weight, but really your body composition. You have lost 5 pounds of muscle and gained 5 pounds of fat. Right? The other villain, we'll say, and this is what I see a lot of my overwhelmed Ophelias and overwhelmed Olivias, depending on which o name you like. I'm a little partial to Ophelia, but my overwhelmed Ophelias often believe, even my skinny fat Sophias believe that the path to a better body is through caloric restriction and lots and lots of cardio, right? And this is not only where, it just is, it's not just misleading, but it becomes physiologically dangerous, right? I want you to picture your body as an extremely intelligent, extremely conservative accountant, right? Whose entire job for the last hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution has been to prevent you from starving to death. Right. That accountant does not know the difference between intentional, like an intentional caloric deficit for aesthetic goals and famine. It only knows that your intake is down. So when you are chronically undereating, when you're adhering to the. It's like the number I always hear is 1100 calories a day, 1200 calories, a. 1400 calories a day. So when you are chronically under eating, I want to be, let's actually just be precise about what chronic means here. Because a single day of low intake, like, who cares, right? This, is this a significant energy deficit over many weeks, many months, in many cases with women, many years, specifically paired with lots of cardio, your, your body does not turn around and be like, great, let's burn fat efficiently. She wants to look great in her cute little matching outfit. No metabolic rate downregulates, your hunger suppressing signal shift. So you stop feeling hungry. Even though that feels like a success. It's actually like a five alarm fire, okay? Because the absence of hunger after prolonged restriction is not your body being fine with less, it's your body adapting to survive on less, which is a very, very different thing. And underneath all of that, something even more consequential, I would argue is happening. Your body starts breaking down tissues that determine almost everything about your shape, right? Your metabolism and your long term health. So you've probably guessed the first one is muscle, second one is bone, third one is your connective tissue capacity. It's very, very expensive to maintain tendons, ligaments and joints. So they are also sacrificed, as I like to say, at the sacrificial altar of skinny. The third villain, we'll say, is the scale. Right. Now we've just kind of talked a little bit about this, but I want to say it one more time in the plainest possible language that I can, because this one, I need it to land for you so that it not only changes your behavior, but also your beliefs. If the scale is the only thing you're tracking, you are literally steering a ship using a compass that's been dropped in water that doesn't work, right? It's like the compass still might spin, but it's not really pointing anywhere useful. Okay? So when we think about this entire industry, right, it's built this business model essentially to sell you that you don't need, pardon my language, that smaller is the goal, that the scale is the referee, right? And the tool to get there is by eating less and calorically restricting yourself and moving more indefinitely forever on repeat, right? And escalating it when it stops working, right? That's not just imperfect, but it's literally working against the very, your, your own biology, right? The, the thing that you actually want, which is curves and muscle and a body that you can trust, it actually destroys that. Right? If you want to look a certain way, like, listen, I am a vain woman and I like to put on my southern as, like, I am a vain woman. I like to look good. I cannot do a southern accent, but I also want to look good. But I'm not going to do it by sacrificing my future body. I'm not going to do it by sacrificing my muscle or my bones or my joints. Right? So that's what the whole, like, the whole industry is like, miscalibrated, right? It's steered and has and continues to steer millions and millions of exhausted, frustrated, hard working women towards this. Smaller is better. Like, you will have arrived somehow when you have a certain number on the scale and the price that you pay for it is often real damage to your hormones, to your joints, to your shape, to your relationship with food. And if I may be so bold, you know, I know I said f the patriarchy, but like, can we just come back there for a minute? Like, if you're stuck counting your calories instead of all the ways that you have been mistreated, misrepresented, underpaid, you know, because you're stuck under training and under eating, how are you going to think for yourself if you haven't eaten, if you haven't had enough calories, how are, how is your brain going to think for itself? How are you going to defend yourself physically? The answer is you can't. You cannot. So, yeah, f the patriarchy as well. All right, I shall slowly step off my soapbox. Okay. I used to think that the changes happening to my face after 40 were just, I don't know, part of the deal, right? Something that I had to accept gracefully or fight very expensively. But what you need to understand is the mechanism. Estrogen supports collagen synthesis. And as estrogen declines, so does your skin's structural integrity. Not because you're aging badly or doing it wrong, but because the hormonal scaffolding that kept everything taught is shifting. Right? Red light therapy is one of the few interventions with actual peer reviewed evidence behind it. Specific wavelengths, we're talking 630 to 850 nanometers. They are going to penetrate the dermis and stimulate fibroblast activity. Your cells are going to produce more collagen, more elastin and that means that the repair mechanism that's been slowing down is now getting a signal to speed back up. I love the Bon Charge Face wand. It's what I use at home. It's the size of a mascara wand and it travels everywhere I go. And most importantly, it works. So I want you to have that too. Head over to boncharge.comforward/better. That's boncharge.com B, T, T, E, R and use the discount code better at checkout. And that is going to give you 5, 15% off your entire cart. Let's actually. Correct. Let's build the map right. Let's build the right map. Because I don't want to just say to you, look at all the ways that we've done. You've been done dirty, because we have been done dirty. And you need to understand that. But I also want to give you something to replace it with. So what does body composition actually mean? First, body composition is the ratio and distribution of the different tissues that make up your total mass. So that's your muscle, your fat, your bone, your water, your connective tissue. Okay? It's like all the things. It's not a number. It's not a number on the scale. It's a proportion. So like I said, two women can weigh, let's call it a buck fifty, two women can weigh 150 pounds and have wildly different body compositions. Right? And it's body composition, not body weight, which is what determines how you look like in a mirror, right? How your clothes fit, how juicy are your calves? Right? Like, how can you get. Like, I have a problem now. I will just say it's like a good problem to have. But a lot of my high boots, I can't get them up anymore because my calves are too big. Right? So how does your clothes fit? How does your metabolism function? And critically, critically, your body composition is also going to determine how you age. So here, I feel, is the most important, single most important sentence in this entire episode. So I want. I want it. I want to slow down. I want you to hear it, right? Skeletal muscle is the largest glucose disposal site in your entire body. So why am I talking about this first? Actually, let's just let that sink in for a sec. Skeletal muscle, or skeletal muscle, depending on what area in the world you are. By the way, I once had somebody say that they cannot take me seriously because I said neuromusculoskeletal system, which is how people in the Commonwealth countries, so Canada, Australia, the uk will say they'll Say musculoskeletal. And I think it was someone from, I don't remember where, but they're like, I can't even take you seriously because you said musculoskeletal. And I was like, okay, musculoskeletal. Okay, musk. So your skeletal or skeletal muscle, biggest glucose disposal site for your entire body. So every time you eat a carbohydrate, that food, okay, so carbohydrates, they get, break down into glucose and your body needs somewhere to put it, right? Muscle tissue, hello, by a wide margin, by total volume, is the biggest sink for that glucose, right? So the more muscle that you have, the more efficient your body is going to be able to clear that sugar, that glucose out of your bloodstream, right. And use it for something productive, right? So creating energy instead of having it circulate and eventually getting stored as fat, especially visceral fat, right? This is the deep abdominal fat, that belly fat that is most associated with other, like, metabolic and cardiovascular disease risk. Now flip that. If you are losing muscle mass, right, as it declines gradually and you're not actively working against it by lifting weights and sprinting and preserving your fast twitch muscle fibers, less glucose gets cleared efficiently from your bloodstream. Every time you have a carbohydrate, right? So blood sugar starts to run a little higher, a little longer and a little more often. This is going to start. This is the breeding ground, if you will, for insulin resistance. And it's like this vicious circle because in, you know, insulin resistance in turn further degrades your ability to preserve and build muscle. It's this very, very cruel loop and it feeds into itself in the wrong direction, right? And it's usually pretty quiet. Like, there's usually not a big announcement from your body that you're developing insulin resistance. Like, you know, it's just one day you sort of look in the mirror and your shape is softened. You know, softened in ways that you can't really explain, even though your weight hasn't really shifted, right? So and the other piece with muscle that I'll say is that when your muscles contract, when you lift, let's say when you push, when you're using them, they are releasing signaling molecules called myokines. And we're actually gonna have a couple of experts coming on the show discussing myokines. These are anti inflammatory compounds. They help regulate your immune function. They help regulate your metabolic health throughout your entire body, right? So muscle isn't just this, like, you know, it's not just like meatheads that look Good in, in a pair of jeans. It's not just this passive thing that like just adds to your looks. It's an active, communicating, hormone releasing organ, right? And when you lose your muscle, you don't just lose your shape, you lose one of your body's primary internal anti inflammatory systems, right? And then if you couple that with the loss of estrogen, that happens for a lot of women in midlife, estrogen is also anti inflammatory. So you almost have this like double whammy because as estrogen declines, you become more inflamed. And as you are in step with that losing muscle, you will become doubly like you will, you will also become more inflamed. So when I say that muscle is the variable that changes everything, I'm not being motivational. I'm, I'm literally, it literally changes everything. And muscle mass and its cousin bone and connective tissue capacity is upstream of your, of your resting metabolism, your ability to regulate blood sugar. As we've discussed, your inflammatory tone, your joint stability, your posture and the visible shape of your body. Everything downstream of it gets better when you have more of it and it gets worse when you don't. So that woman in my DMs, I started off the top of this podcast with, she said to me, I just feel like my body has stopped listening. Now I've told you that the body treats chronic under fueling like a famine signal. And here's the mechanism underneath that, because I want you to understand this at a deeper level than eat more. Trust me. Right, because that's what I'm telling you to do. You need to eat more. At any given moment, your muscle, how much muscle you have is the net result of two competing processes. One is muscle protein synthesis, which you've probably heard of, right? Which, which will wrap up in a discussion around protein. And the other thing that determines how much muscle you have is something called muscle protein breakdown. So your body is constantly running both processes. Constantly. It's the same with bone. Your bo, you're, you're constantly either building up bone or breaking it down. Same with muscle. You're building it up and breaking it down. And whether you gain muscle, maintain muscle or lose muscle depends on which process wins, right? On average, over time. So is it, do you have a net gain of muscle because you have more muscle protein synthesis than you have muscle protein breakdown, or are you losing muscle because you have more net muscle protein breakdown? So when we talk about muscle protein synthesis, you've, like I said, you've probably heard of this before. The protein conversation, I would say probably ad nauseam. Now everybody knows they should be having more protein. Roughly something like 20 to 30 grams of high quality protein or at least two and a half grams of loose seen is going to robustly stimulate that building signal. Great. Most women trying to improve their bodies have gotten this memo right? We already know this. But the memo that almost nobody gets is that if muscle protein breakdown is elevated at the same time, you can hit your protein target perfectly because you are a good girl and you are having your 130 grams of protein every day. But, but if you are not seeing visible results, it means that you are breaking down more protein that you're than you're creating. So I mean, it's not, it's not a mystery, it's just math. Okay, so as muscle protein breakdown goes up, it goes up under a couple of different conditions. Specifically, chronically low carbohydrate intake. Is she back on the carb thing again? Yes, I am back on the carb thing again. Okay. Extended fasting, that's another way. Or insufficient total energy. And I'll say another category is inadequate or insufficient recovery between training sessions. That woman who DMed me training five days a week was tracking her macros very tightly, probably keeping carbs pretty conservative. These are like my skinny fat Sophias, even my exorcist Emily's, who are training really intensely, but their nutrition hasn't caught up to it. She was taught clean eating, you know, whatever that means, and is very likely checking, like checking one or two of those boxes. Insufficient total calories, insufficient carbohydrates, or too aggressive fasting. And yes, I'm inviting you to carb landia. It's nice to go into low carb land temporarily if you have a metabolic condition that you're trying to solve or you want to improve your insulin sensitivity. But you have to know that it's a vacation. When you go somewhere tropical and you're like, should I live here? It's like, no, you should vacation there often. But you have to come home. And I'm telling you to come home. I'm telling you to come home to carbs. Because carbohydrates specifically matter for muscle preservation. And I want to clear this up because I know that some of you just flinched. I know I, I felt the flinch, okay? You're like, I know she's talking about carbs for those people, but not me. I know that. I know you flinched when I said carbs just a second ago. Okay. When you eat carbohydrates, My friend, insulin rises, and insulin is not the terrible villain you know it. It does not live up to the terrible reputation that it's been made out to online. Its primary job in this context is anti catabolic, which is nerd speak for anti breakdown. It suppresses muscle breakdown. When insulin is around, we don't break things down, right? It's not a direct build muscle signal on its own, but it's a stop tearing muscle down signal. So when your carbohydrate intake stays chronically low, insulin is also going to stay low too. So again, initially, that is very good for someone who is insulin resistance. We do want to, we want to claw back on the carbs and the insulin signaling initially, but at some point you have to reintroduce it. If not for your thyroid, which is another podcast altogether. But when we're talking specifically about muscle protein breakdown, muscle protein, you carbohydrates, and the presence of insulin will preserve your muscle. And if you're the type of, you know, brain that's already thinking, well, my body can just make its own, you know, make its own glucose through gluconeogenesis. Yes, I've heard that argument before. Gold star on your chart, by the way, for recognizing that. But here's the catch. Gluconeogenesis or gng for the cool cats who don't want to say, gluconeogenesis is super inefficient and it pulls amino acids. Guess what? It has to pull amino acids from somewhere, right, in order to do it. And guess where it pulls it from. The dietary protein that could have gone towards repairing your own muscle tissue itself has been sacrificed for gluconeogenesis in order to keep your blood sugar stable. You are quite literally cannibalizing the tissue that you're trying to build in order to compensate for not eating enough fuel that your tissue needs. And that is what I believe the exact trap from that woman who sent that DM to me was likely in, right? She was training really hard, eating very clean, keeping carbs low, because that's the story that she was told. And protein was probably on target. She was probably having 130, 140, 150 grams of protein a day. But her body, because her body is infinitely more intelligent, doing exactly what bodies are built to do under these conditions, prioritized survival over aesthetics. So held onto fat stores as a buffer because she didn't have sufficient total calories and allowed her muscle to erode at close to the same rate that she was trying to build it because she wasn't having sufficient carbohydrates. So I say this with love, because she's not failing, right? Her inputs were incomplete, and her body, in its infinite wisdom, was just. Just did what it did with the instructions that it received. So you, my friend, and I'm looking directly at you, if you're watching this on, on YouTube or I'm talking directly to you, you are not eating enough calories and probably enough carbohydrates. So if curves are the goal, we want to think about including more carbohydrates. Now, let's talk about the scale for a minute, because I feel, I mean, you already know how I feel about scales. I don't like them, but I feel that we should be looking at proportions of a body rather than the weight on the scale. So I really like measurements. A waist to hip measurement is my favorite because I feel like if you have, you know, a waist to hip ratio of 0.8 or less, meaning that your waist measurement, centimeters or inches is 80% or less of your glutes or your hip measurement, which is a measurement of your bones and your glute development, I think that you're winning, right? And you actually want. You want the waist measurement to go down, but you want the hip measurement to go up, right? Because if your glutes are developing the number, the hip measurement should be going up. And that is a good thing, right? When you put those two things together, a smaller waist and bigger glutes, you start to now think about that lower body flare and that hourglass shape, and that is going to tell me a much richer story about your body composition, about your longevity, and about your capacity than the number on the scale ever could. So if you take your waist measurement at the smallest part, not at your belly button, ladies, especially if you've had children, we all know, at least mine has, my navel has migrated south relative to where it used to be. So the smallest area of your waist and then the widest part of your hips, divide those two numbers into each other. You want about a 0.8 or 80%. Beyond the tape measure, the other things that you can be looking for body composition is you want to be looking about how your clothes are fitting, right? Are you noticing that the number of, you know, on the dumbbell or the barbell or the machine pin, are those weights actually going up over weeks or months? What your energy looks like during the day? What is your sleep quality like? Whether your cravings are settling down instead of intensifying? Right? None of those are going to show up on a bathroom scale. Those are what we would call NSVs non scale victories. And quite frankly, all those are way more honest than a bathroom scale is. Right. If you want, I have done this, throw out that scale, put it in the garbage. I mean, maybe literally, don't rely on that. I also promised you that this wasn't going to be a lecture that leaves you more informed but just as equally stuck. So let's talk about what actually changes the trajectory of getting you that better waist hip ratio. Those NSVs. I want to give you three shifts, I want to give you some mental shifts and I want to give you some behavioral shifts to take away from the show. So these are things that you can start doing this week before you've bought anything or joined anything or read anything else. So the first shift is you are going to start lifting heavier. Heavier than you are right now if you are lifting and if you are not somebody who has ever picked up a pair of weights and you're going to start with your own body weight. But you're not going to be doing this to be toned and slim, right? Not three pound dumbbells, not something that you can hold in the coffee shop conversation without noticing. Heavy. Heavy enough that it demands your attention and that the last couple of reps in a set are genuinely hard. So the number, whatever heavy is for you, it doesn't. The number matters less than how it feels. It should feel heavy to you for the last couple of repetitions in a set. This is probably the highest, like the single highest leverage input for preserving and building muscle tissue than it is that's going to be driving your metabolism, your blood sugar regulation and your shape. If you're pro, if you're, you know, one of my betties who are doing like four or five cardio sessions a week and zero heavy resistance training. Here's a concrete swap. Okay, Just take one of those sessions, just one. You can still keep the other four or the other three and you're going to do one strength session instead this week. So I'm not adding anything to your plate, I'm just swapping. So it's an instead of. So instead of four sessions this week of cardio, you'll do three and you'll do one strength session. That's one substitution. And if you do that consistently, I promise you double pinky promise that this is going to change the signal that your body is receiving in a way like in, in when you will see in months that additional cardio could never do. So. So the second shift, the second Action item. Obviously eat enough protein. Okay, Enough protein and carbs. So enough protein and carbs. So what do I mean by that? Lots of people will say protein one. You know, you have one gram of protein per ideal pound of body weight. That's typically the, the recommendation. I like that. I'm going to say without you falling off your chair or getting into a car accident, if you're listening to this, driving. The same for carbs. Yeah, I'll just let that sit for a second. One gram of carbs per ideal pound of body weight. That is going to be enough to build, not just maintain, but to build. And I know that, I know, I know this is going to feel counterintuitive if you spent years associating like less with progress. I need you, I've said this before, I need you to stop thinking about being a loser, stop losing. Instead, I want you to think about building. I want you to sit with that discomfort for a second. I want you to sit with that discomfort of that inversion for a second. Because it's that exact belief that we've spent the last, I don't know, however many minutes dismantling. You cannot build a house while simultaneously demolishing it. If you're in a chronic energy deficit. Your body will not prioritize building. It will not prioritize building visible, shapely, gorgeous muscle. It will prioritize survival. So you have to feed the process that you're trying to create. You're trying to build. Stop trying to lose. Because what ends up happening is as you build, you end up getting the body that you want. And then the last shift I want you to do is stop measuring yourself on the scale. Just stop. I'm not asking you to pretend that they don't exist. I'm just asking you to fire the bad referee. And we've seen a lot of bad refereeing with this, with this recent World Cup. But I'm asking you to fire the referee that's been calling the wrong shots, the wrong calls on the game this whole time. And instead you're going to hire a referee that is going to do the right ones. So waist measurements, hip measurements, strength numbers, energy, sleep, how you're close it on your body, that's the refing you want. Give yourself those metrics and give those metrics the authority that you have been giving the scale. And I want you to watch how differently the next few months feel. Even if the scale doesn't move, let's just pretend it's not going to move at all. That's it. This is not a 12 week shift. It's not a meal plan. It's not, I don't know, it's not like a, I, I always say, like it's not like the 75 hard or the 8 week shred. It's a different set of instructions for your body so that your body, because your body's always listening and it will do what you get. Like your body is not betraying you. But if you have been taught to betray your body, you are not going to have what you want. So to close, I want to go back to that DM one more time. She said, I feel like my body just stopped listening. And here's what I know. After two decades plus now of working, doing this work with women is exactly like her, maybe you as well. Your body has not stopped listening. Not for one single second of one single day. Your beautiful body, your beautiful body has been responding accurately, faithfully. Like a dedicated soldier who's so in love with you will do whatever you ask her mechanistically. Every single instruction you've ever given her, she's done it. She's been responding. The problem is we've been taught by this industry that profits from our own confusion to do the wrong things to our bodies. To eat less, to do more cardio, to cut back on carbs forever, right? To watch the number on the scale, to shrink. Your body has heard every single one of those instructions and followed them exactly. She hasn't betrayed you. If anything, I would say that that's devotion, right? It's just, it's like fidelity. It's been fidelity to the wrong information. So that's the reframe I want you to leave with. And it's the same one that I gave this person who slid into my DMs. Is that what I ended up responding to her was something along I paraphrasing it, but it was like your body didn't stop listening. It's been listening this whole time. You've just been telling her the wrong things to do. Change the conversation that you're having with your body and watch what happens. I've seen it so many times where women start eating more, dare I say more carbs. And they're like, what is this sorcery? How am I losing weight and I'm eating more? So if what you've heard today, you know, if something clicked for you, maybe you recognize yourself in that woman who DM'd me. Or maybe you have that like frustration that you're doing everything right and you're not watching Anything. Move. This is. This is the. You know, if you're interested, this is the work that we do inside Lift, right? It's a heavy, progressive strength training program built exactly for the stage of life that many people who follow me are in, in perimenopause and menopause. If you don't want to join Lyft, that's fine too. Just go find something heavy to lift this week. I promise you, your body will adapt. Your body has been waiting for you for better instructions. So go and give her one. All right with that, my love song for you, my solo sewed, my soliloquy. Let me know what you're going to do this week. Are you going to ditch the scale? Are you going to pay attention? Are you going to hire a better referee? We need better referees for football and soccer anyway. Another conversation. Are you going to start applying the principles of progressive overload by maybe starting with I'm lifting heavier weights? I want to hear from you, leave comments, Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to this show, and I look forward to hearing from them. And I'll see you next time.
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I hope you enjoyed today's episode. And now I must give you the obligatory legal and medical disclaimer. This podcast, Better with Dr. Stephanie, is for general information only. The advice and recommendations we discuss do not replace medical, chiropractic, or any other primary healthcare provider's advice, treatment or care in the consumption of this podcast. There is no doctor patient relationship and the use and implementation of the information discussed are at the sole discretion of the listener. Please take this information to your primary healthcare provider to make the best choice for you. Remember, I am a doctor, but I am not your doctor, and these episodes are meant for educational purposes only.