Ep #76: Weight Loss Challenges – Part 1

Welcome to The Life Coach School Podcast, where it's all about real clients, real problems, and real coaching. Now, your host, Master Coach Instructor, Brooke Castillo.

Hello, my friends. I'm so excited to be here again to chat with you all and hang out and share with you how amazing life is. My children just started school. It's a beautiful thing. My oldest, Christian is in high school, and he has lots of hormones right now, and he is very interested in testing his boundaries let's say. That's been enjoyable. Then, my younger one is in eighth grade, and he is not fond of school, and so he's been in very grumpy mood. He spent all summer staying up way past midnight, and so he's now recalibrating himself to the school day, and he's not amused at all. That's what I have going on. The good news is that there's no children at the house during the day, and they're back to learning, and we're having dinners together at night and doing homework, so yay for school.

All right. Today, we're going to talk about weight loss challenges. This is a two-part story. Basically, I'm going to go through five of the things that challenge us and help us, and that are tools that we need to understand, and then, in the next one, I'll go through the second five. I have a list of ten things that I've created. Let me just do an overview of the first five that I'm going to talk about. We're going to talk about understanding why you're overweight in the first place. We're going to talk about understanding hunger, understanding hormones, understanding fuel, and then understanding exercise. I have a very different approach to all of these things that you may not be familiar with. As most of you know, I am currently in the depths of research for a program that I'm creating that's called 'Stop Overeating Masterclass'.

It's a small group of women that I am going to take intensely through my new research, my new programs, of course built on the foundation of the weight loss work that I have already created and create one of the, I think will be one of the most successful programs that has ever been created by a coach, nutritionist, personal trainer anywhere. That's my goal, and I've been working very hard on this program and I'm really excited to share it with you all. If you are interested in joining that interest list, you can go to 'TheLifeCoachSchool.com/Stopovereating'. Give me your email address in there, and I'll make sure that you are on the first to know list. Okay. Let's dive in. We are going to talk about these issues. I'm going to give you a general overview. When I was preparing to do this podcast, I've got very carried away. If I included everything that I had prepared, this podcast would be at least an hour, and one of the things that I hear from you guys often is that you love that the podcasts are short, so here's the deal.

I'm going to give you a general overview, some concepts, some ideas. Please know that I take this much deeper in the 'Stop Overeating Masterclass', and then the work that I do with people in small groups, so I’m going to give you a nice introduction to this and then if you want more information, make sure you're on the interest list. Okay. Let's talk about understanding why you're overweight in the first place. This is huge, you guys. People understanding why they're overweight seems to be one of the most surprising things that people discover. When you ask someone why they're overweight, it's an interesting answer that I get. People will say "Because I have no willpower", or people will say "Because I'm genetically unfortunate", or they'll say "Because I've always been this way", "Because I always overeat", "Because I can't control myself". Like what is your answer to that question? One of the things that's really important is that you explore the truth as to why that is. "Why are you weighing more than you want to?" Okay?

Now, the bottom line is you're overeating. You're eating more than your body requires for fuel. Basically, what that means is you're eating excess food for whatever reason, and then that food is being processed into fat on your body. It is impossible to be overweight if you don't eat more than your body requires for fuel. If you eat exactly what your body requires for fuel and not a morsel more, then you stay the same weight. Right? There's a lot of things that that depends on. What your body requires for fuel depends on a lot, and how much you eat depends on a lot. We're going to talk more about that in this podcast, but explore the truth as to why you're overweight and why you overeat. Really be honest about what those reasons are, and it's really important that you do that from a curious, and fascinated, and kind place so you can find the answer in a way that is meaningful.

If you start criticizing yourself or looking at it from a judgmental way, you will not be able to find the true cause of why you're overweight, and that's what you must find in order to change it. The other thing that's important to do I think when you're asking yourself that question is "How overweight are you?" When I ask clients "Why are you overweight?", they'll say, "I'm a little bit overweight. I'm this much overweight." How much overweight are you? Really look at those numbers and look at how healthy you are when you ask that question. I cannot tell you how many people are shocked by the truth of how overweight and how unhealthy they really are. As people who eat emotionally, we are very good at avoiding ourselves and being in denial. There have been times where I have stopped on the scale, where I was "How did that happen? When did I start weighing that?", or "I went to go trying clothes and they didn't fit. What the heck?", because we're so out of touch with ourselves sometimes.

One of the things that I highly recommend that you do is you get some tests done to really understand the truth and to answer the question of why you're overweight. I highly recommend that you go to fasting blood glucose test. This is not something that your doctor will order without you asking, but it's one of the most important test I think anyone can have. The reason why is there are 8.1 million undiagnosed diabetes cases in the United States. There are eight million people that have it and don't know it. Diabetes is no joke, you all, and you don't have to be obese to have diabetes. If you're an emotional eater and you are obese, there's a very high chance that you might have it, at least insulin resistance or pre-diabetes. One of the reasons why I embarked on this new level of understanding when it comes to weight loss is because my son before he went through puberty had insulin resistance. He had insulin issues, and so I started studying it. He has since figured it out. His body went through puberty. In a way, we followed all the doctor's instructions, and he no longer has to deal with that.

Now, if he starts eating tons of carbs and doesn't watch what he's eating and doesn't take care of himself, then he could end up being insulin resistant again and getting pre-diabetes, and then maybe diabetes. The way that we will know that is by doing regular fasting glucose test on him, and that's really important for all of us to know. For some reason, doctors are not very good at diagnosing diabetes, and it's because they don't regularly run the test that will measure for it, which is the fasting glucose. I highly recommend that you all get that test done and anyone who goes through my program, that will be required that they get that test done. You should also test your cholesterol, your triglycerides, your blood pressure. You should weigh yourself and know the truth about how that measures up to where you would like to be, how overweight are you, and your waist circumference. There's a lot of health issues associated with the larger waist circumference, so make sure that you measure that. Okay? The other test that I like to measure because it helps you understand your own fitness and how well you process oxygen in your body, how healthy you are when it comes to your own physical fitness is to test your VO2 max which is basically, you can go in and get in a treadmill, and basically, you work out as hard as you possibly can, and then you see how you process oxygen. The other way to do that is to measure your resting heart rate, and then measure your maximum heart rate. You take your maximum heart rate, you divide it by your resting heart rate, and then you times by 15.3. Then of course, we'll like to a calculator to do that in the show notes, but those are test I think everybody should know and be very familiar with when it comes to their body especially diabetes.

So many of my clients are at risk for diabetes, and that is one of those things that once you're diagnosed with, it's very hard to get rid of that diagnosis, and once you have to start taking insulin for diabetes, then you're in real trouble, because the issue with diabetes is that you're insulin resistant. Right? You have too much insulin in your blood. It's preventing any weight loss. The treatment for diabetes is insulin, so it's a problem. That's why it's such an issue, because you have to be treated with insulin in order to stay alive. The insulin is the problem. If I can help even just one person preventing themselves from going from pre-diabetic to diabetic, I will have done my work here. Okay? Get yourself tested. "How overweight are you?", "How healthy are you?", and then ask why. Tell yourself the truth without being mean. Be honest and curious and kind with yourself, and really take some full responsibility for where you are in a kind way.

Number two, understanding hunger. Hunger is one of the biggest challenges that we will ever have to face when it comes to losing weight. It is something that many diets don't even consider. Right? So many diets only consider the food and giving you a food plan on what you can eat and not eat. It doesn't take an account of hunger, and how to manage your hunger, and what causes your hunger, and how to work with it, and how to use it as a tool. The first thing that's really important for you to remember is the difference between physical and emotional hunger. Now, when I say it's important for you to remember, for some of you, you haven't felt physical hunger since you were maybe a little kid and you had to go through school without snacks for five hours which I mean, it's almost unheard of now that people would go five hours within the day without a snack, and so many of us have no idea what it even means to feel hunger at all. When I talk to many of my clients about the different waves and layers of hunger, they have no idea what I am talking about. They haven't been hungry in literally decades. They have never allowed themselves to get truly hungry because they're constantly eating.

First and foremost, you need to understand the difference between the sensation of hunger, which is something that starts in your body and travels to your brain. Your body lets you know that there is no food in there. Your fat stores let you know how much fat is there and whether you need food or not, and that travels to your brain. Okay? My work is all about helping my clients eat only what their body requires for fuel, and therefore gives them space to actually burn some fat, and when you eat less than your body requires for fuel, you give yourself a lot more space to burn fat. Now, one of the things that I hear back from my clients and it's a really deep fear is "If I eat less than my body requires for fuel, then I won't have as much energy." What that means is that they have been relying only on food for their energy, and not necessarily on fat. One of the most amazing things that I had learned when I was going through this research is that your body can utilize glycogen. It can utilize that from your food immediately, and it's the easiest source of energy, but your body also regularly utilizes your fat stores because we like to think about fat as something that's like stock in our bodies, but if you are naturally thin and you're eating only the amount of food that your body needs, it's not like that food is utilized right in that moment. Right?

What happens is your food is stored as fat, and then it flows in and out of your bloodstream to be used as energy, so your body regularly is ... If you're active and you're eating only what your body requires for fuel, it depletes your glycogen and actually utilizes your fat for energy. Okay? If you're only relying on your food for energy, you're going to be overeating, and I found that to be totally fascinating. One of my goals is to teach my students how to eat only when they are hungry. Right? If you are eating a lot of the time when you aren't hungry, where you're eating past the point of fullness on a consistent basis and then eating again before you get hungry, you are never going to be able to utilize any part of your fat stores, even the stuff that was stored in there just today. Right? We set ourselves up, so we eat something today, and it's stored as fat. That's not a bad thing.

In a regular normal person with a normal metabolism, that would be stored as fat, and it'd be taken out later, taken out when you're sleeping to be utilized in and out, in and out very easily. It's part of our process. Where we get into trouble is when we eat stored as fat, eat stored as fat, and then constantly are utilizing only what we're eating and everything else is getting stored as fat, and we're not utilizing it later. We're just eating again. Okay? When you allow hunger and you learn about hunger, you realize that it's not an emergency. You're not going to die. You're not going to pass out. You're not going to get lightheaded and faint. Many of us have plenty of storage that we can utilize for energy. That's what it's there for. That's why your body was designed that way.

I like to say that hunger is a beautiful, wonderful thing. It lets us know that we are alive. It indicates that we have an appetite, that we are utilizing, that we're alive. Right? One of the things that I like to do with hunger is teach my clients how to tune into it and feel it, especially if they haven't felt it in a long time. It taps them back into their body. They get tuned into it. Now, in the next podcast, we're going to talk about one of the hazards of doing that, of tuning into your body and your hunger that you will also be turning into your emotional life. That's a beautiful thing. We need to learn how to deal with our emotional life.

Most of us have turned off our connection to our body because we don't want to deal with our emotional life. Many of us started this when we were young kids, not wanting to deal with the vibration of emotion. As we tune back in to our hunger signals, we also tune back into our feelings, and I'm going to talk to you about how to deal with those emotions in the next podcast. For now, you need to be able to differentiate "Am I hungry for food?", or "Am I just bored? Am I just sad? Am I just anxious?" Being able to differentiate is a huge piece of my work with clients, and so one of the things that we have to do is allow ourselves to get hungry enough so we can distinguish between the two. When we allow ourselves to get hungry, we give our body a break from insulin. This is very important. I'm going to talk more about that later, but if we're eating all the time, we do not give our body a break from insulin. It's constantly in our blood, and that completely prevents any kind of fat loss.

When we get hungry, it gives us an opportunity to burn fat for fuel. Okay? If we're hungry at least to a negative two on a hunger scale, we've given our body a chance to access our resources, our storage. If we eat the minute we feel not full, not even hungry but not full which is what many of us do, we never give ourselves a chance to burn any fat. Hunger is amazing because it helps us enjoy our food more. Right? It tastes better. A lot of chefs say "The best spice is hunger because food tastes so much better when we're hungry." The last thing about hunger that's such a beautiful thing is when you start eating something when you're hungry, you will then be able to identify when you are sated. If you are constantly eating, you will never know what fullness is compared to being hungry because you're in a constant state of fullness, so you will have degrees of fullness, and you will never be able to experience the ultimate difference between hunger and fullness.

The more you allow yourself to get hungry, the more in touch you are with when you're actually full, so learning about managing and using hunger in a way that serves you is one of the most important challenges to overcome when you're trying to lose weight, tuning into that hunger, tuning into your body and how it's communicating with you, tuning into your body and what it means to be fully connected with yourself without judgment, without denial. So many of us have gone in so many diets where we've ignored our hunger, we've denied our hunger, and that we've turned away from ourselves in a contemptuous way. That's very different than allowing your hunger and experiencing it in a very healthy, wonderful way. When you notice that when you're hungry that other emotions come up, a lot of people will talk about being "hangry." What that means to me is that a lot of times when we have emptied our bodies of food and we have that immediate need to replace it, that we aren't really able to be present with ourselves when it's not a hundred percent comfort. Being hungry is mildly uncomfortable, and many of us have no tolerance for any of that. That's one of the reasons why we've never allowed ourselves to lose weight. Okay. The third thing I'm going to talk about today is understanding hormones. Understanding your hormones is so important when it comes to weight loss.

If you grew up in the '80s like I did, you've probably studied a lot about calories in, calories out, and how everything is just determined by how many calories you eat and how many calories you expend. Unfortunately, that is not true. It would make losing weight much easier or that to be exactly true, that how can you explain two people that eat the exact same amount of food and do the exact same amount of exercise but lose weight differently or don't lose weight differently. Right? One loses weight and one doesn't, or they don't lose weight. Right? How do you explain that if it's all calories in, calories out? Thirty-five hundred calories in, 3,500 calories out. That's a pound of fat. Right? I should be losing a pound.

Why doesn't that work long-term? The answer is hormones. Okay? I talk about one of my clients all the time where she called me. She's like, "Oh my gosh. I've gained all this weight since I've gone through menopause. It's so interesting. I had to go out and buy all new clothes." She didn't make it mean it was some horrible thing. She just thought it was interesting.

"Oh, my hormones must have changed. I'm holding weight differently". She didn't think she had done something wrong. She didn't think anything had even gone wrong. She just noticed, "Hey. Menopause causes me ..." She was impairing "Menopause is causing me to gain weight. It has nothing to do with how much I'm eating. It has nothing to do with who I am. It just has to do with my hormones", and she is right. You notice when kids go from pre-puberty through puberty, how much weight they gain, how they go fill out and go through that process.

They may not even be eating anymore, although my child has never stopped eating since he started going through puberty. With menopause especially, a lot of my clients haven't changed the way they've been eating at all, and they start gaining weight. The answer, the reason is hormones. The three main hormones that I'm going to focus on and talk about ... There are other ones that I'll go into more detail within my class, but I want to offer you three here on this podcast. The first one is insulin. It's the most important hormone when it comes to weight loss, and there's so much I have to tell you about insulin. I studied it in depth when my son was diagnosed with insulin resistance, and it really helped me help him. He lost 25 pounds immediately as soon as we found out about this, and it was really powerful to have this knowledge. Basically, your pancreas creates insulin, and the insulin's job as a hormone is to carry glucose to your muscles and to your fat stores. It's basically glucose's ride so to speak.

The issue with insulin, the reason why it's so important with fat loss is this. If you have insulin in your blood, you are not able to release fat into your blood or fatty acids to be used as energy. Why does this matter? Because, the reason why this matters is because you want to be able to take the fat out of your fat stores and use it as energy, and have it be processed as energy, and have it not exist anymore, but it cannot be released when there's insulin in the blood, and here's why. When you eat something, insulin is released, so you don't need to be releasing fat at the same time. It's a brilliant design. The body is like, "Woah. We have food coming in. We don't need to utilize the fat. Let's save that for later and let's utilize the food. We're in storing mode right now."

When you're eating, you're in storing mode. Okay? That's when you're eating an hour or two after that depending on how much you've eaten a meal. For some, if you have a huge meal, it'll be a lot longer than that afterwards. If it's a smaller meal, it would be shorter. Right? When you're in storage mode, you are not in burning mode. You can only be in one or the other. When you're in storing mode, it's when there's insulin in your blood. When you are in utilizing fat mode, there is no insulin in your blood. Okay?

You can see why if there's a constant source of insulin in your blood, you will not burn fat. There are two things that affect insulin the most. One of them is carbohydrate. The more sugar you eat and carbohydrate you eat which is converted to sugar immediately, the higher your insulin levels will be. Okay? The other thing that affects it is just eating anything. Right? If you eat carbs, you're going to have a lot bigger insulin, but the only time you're not going to have any insulin in your blood is when you're not eating. Okay? It's really important to remember first of all how many carbs and the types of carbs you eat will affect insulin in your blood and how often and how long and how much you eat will affect the insulin in your blood, and it's important to understand that.

The next two hormones that I'm most interested in are leptin and ghrelin. Now, leptin, the reason why it's important is it inhibits hunger. Okay? It basically tells you "I'm full. I'm not hungry." What's fascinating about this hormone to me is that it's made by your fat tissues. Okay? The theory is the more fat you have, the less ghrelin you have, which means the less hungry you are. I think this is why a lot of people who have high functioning hormones can gain a lot of weight, and then lose it very naturally because they have that increase in leptin in their bodies and is telling them not to eat as much, so they can go back and regulate. If you've ever heard this idea of the 'Setpoint', leptin has a huge role in that.

Now, one of the problems that can happen is if you consistently are eating all of the time and you have an excess of fat on your body, you can become what they call 'Leptin resistant', which basically means the hormone is trying to explain to your brain that you are full. That hormone is no longer active. You're not hearing it anymore. They call it 'Leptin resistance'. It's the same with insulin. You can become insulin resistant if you are consistently eating, and you have a constant flow of carbs. If you are consistently eating all day long, and there's always insulin in your blood, your body becomes and can become resistant to it. Right? It can become resistant to that message because it's just like a constant drone. "Insulin, insulin, insulin." If you become insulin resistant, what happens is, your body has a hard time using the insulin to store the food. Right?

Basically, and this is what happened with Christian, anytime he would eat something, it would be immediately stored as fat. He was having a hard time getting it into his muscles and utilizing it. What would happen is he would be immediately hungry again because he wasn't utilizing it. It was crazy. We would go to a restaurant, and we'd leave the restaurant, and he'd be like, "I'm starving". I'm like, "What are you talking about? We just ate.” The same thing with leptin that basically tells you, "Hey, you're full”. You can become resistant to that, so you don't feel full even though you've just eaten a meal. Okay? That's insulin and leptin.

Now, ghrelin is basically what increases your appetite and tells you that you are hungry, and you want to make sure that with ghrelin that that is created in your stomach, that you get enough in your stomach to basically have ghrelin turn off so it's not constantly increasing your appetite. If you're only eating a little, tiny bit, your stomach is always going to be empty and you're going to have your appetite being increased by ghrelin. One of the ways to turn off ghrelin and we'll talk a lot more about this is to basically eat food that fills up your stomach, like a lot of veggies and a lot of ... Making sure that you're giving yourself proper nourishment in the way that increases basically the fill in your stomach and then therefore, you won't be getting an increase in appetite all of the time. The point is, when your stomach is empty, ghrelin is telling your brain "It's time to eat something", so being aware of that hormone is important. Okay? It's important to know that it's not just calories in, calories out. It's how sensitive you are to these hormones, how these hormones are genetically created for you. Right?

It's important to know some people are much more insulin sensitive than others. Some people, the minute they eat a carbohydrate, it's sent to the muscle and utilized very easily. These are these naturally thin people that can eat whatever they want. I'm not going to make any comment about them. They're our friends. We love them. My brother is this way. He can eat whatever he wants and is just always thin. It's very fun to watch him eat everything. He wants with no concern literally for whether it's healthy or not.

I'm not saying that's a healthy thing to do, but he's very insulin sensitive versus other people who are very insulin resistant from the get-go even as children, and they can completely compound that by eating too many carbs and eating all of the time. Your hormones determine how often you get hungry, how you store fat, how you burn fat, and when you get full. You can see how hormones have a huge part in the process of losing weight, and that is one of the reasons why I have been in depth studying them for the past six months, and how I will be applying everything I've learned and all the latest research to all the work that I do with my clients to help them lose weight in the most efficient way possible, and not in a way that leaves us starving because that's not useful, and not in a way that leaves us insulin resistant or leptin resistant, or really severely uncomfortable for a long period of time. That's one of the things that's important to remember about hormones. One of the reasons why restricting calories, eating less than your body requires for fuel every single day for long periods of time only works temporarily because it causes such an issue with your hormones. If you are depriving your body of its usable calories for three days, your body does not know that it doesn't live in a cave, and it starts adjusting its hormone balance to make sure that you have enough fat storage because there's not enough food in the world. Right? That's why going on these "Let's eat less than 3,500 calories", so in a detriment of 3,500 calories every single day for a week why the body stops responding. It's because of hormones. Okay? There's a way to work around that, but you have to understand hormones, and you really have to understand your hormone indicators.

One of the things that's important for us to understand is not just to get our hormones tested because most of us will test within the normal ranges. They're really testing for really disease abnormalities which is important of course, but there's so many subtleties that come with our hormones when we learn how to feel them. Most of us feel them once a month, but when we learn how to feel them on a day-to-day basis, we can adjust our eating and our hunger and our fullness and the types of food we're eating in a way that can really serve us with our long-term weight loss goals. The next one that I'm going to talk about is understanding fuel. I think fuel is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to losing weight. What fuel will serve our body the best? Most of us look outside of ourselves for the answer to this. We'd look at diets. We'd look what works for other people. Everyone wants to know what I eat. What I eat is not going to be the same as what you eat, and you have a different body composition. You have a different hormonal composition.

You have a different activity level, and you have different food preferences, so you eating exactly what I eat is not necessarily going to serve you. I've heard so many people that go in a Paleo Diet and say "That is the most amazing thing that I've ever done for myself", and I'm so excited that someone has found their fuel by doing that. I think diets can be useful in looking at that, but I've had other people go on the Paleo and say, "Oh my God. It's awful. I feel terrible and it doesn't serve me." That's why I can't pick one diet to follow for everyone. How can I possibly know what everyone should eat? I have developed a process to help you figure out what your diet should be, what your fuel should be, and it has to work within the criteria of what you want food to do for you. Here's how I've established it. First and foremost, does it taste good?

Most of us have fuel that we enjoy eating that taste good to us. Right? It may not be all the fuel. We may not like Brussels sprouts. We may like broccoli, so does it taste good? It has to taste good or you won't eat it, so what's the point? Right? Does it feel good in your body? There's a lot of food that tastes really good that doesn't feel good in my body. Popcorn tastes good. It doesn't feel good in my body.

French fries, the most amazing tasting thing in the world, especially if they're crispy and you dip them into ranch dressing. They are delicious. They do not feel good in my body. I eat them sometimes anyway, but I know that I'm going to have to pay the price in not feeling good, but they are not fuel for me. Is it healthy by your standards? Have you done enough research to understand how it affects you and your body? By the way, it feels and by the chemistry of it, you know what it's doing. For example, you may say "I love to eat crackers." Right? I think crackers taste good, and they feel good in my body, but do you know what that cracker is doing in your bloodstream?

How is it affecting your weight loss? Is it giving you an insulin surge that is staying in your blood for the next two hours and preventing weight loss? Is it healthy for you? You need to understand enough nutrition to know biochemically what that is doing in your body. We have ways of testing that that are actually quite inexpensive and easy to do, and we also have a lot of knowledge where you can just understand the effect of certain macros have on your body. What I mean by macros is "Is it a carbohydrate? Is it a protein? Is it a fat?" Right? It's a macro nutrient.

"Of those three, how does it affect your body, and then within those macros, how do certain things affect your body?" First of all, what is the food made up of, and then do you understand your body's tolerance? Some people can have a lot of carbohydrate, and it's not a problem. Some people can have a lot of fat, and it's not a problem. Right? You need to find out what you can have, and we want to look at it in combinations too. That's one of the important work that is worth doing I promise you. Okay? Finally, does it give you the results you want? I can't tell you how many of my clients I talk to, they say, "I've always eaten this food. I really enjoy it. It feels great in my body."

I said, "But you haven't been able to lose weight. This food is not serving you. You've always eaten it and you've always been overweight. We need to try something different. We need to maybe eliminate that food and put something else in and see what the effect is." Just because you think it's healthy, just because it tastes good, just because it feels good in your body doesn't mean it's fuel for you if it doesn't give you the result you want. You need to find foods that keep you at the weight that you want to stay at. You can I promise you find a collection of foods that are specific for your body that taste good, that feel good, that are healthy, and that get you the results you want. I want to just add, there's a lot of foods that people have eliminated from their diet and never eaten because they have this idea that they're not healthy, because of something they've read, and I've introduced those foods back into my client's life, and it's completely changed not just how they feel about those foods, but how those foods are utilized in their body and they become fuel for them that they had eliminated previously. The things that you need to remember when it comes to food is understanding first of all, "How does that food affect my hormones?", "How does it affect my weight?", "How does it affect how I feel?" That's what matters when it comes to fuel.

Having an intellectual understanding of food is very important. That's step one, but having a intimate relationship with that food and your specific body is really important. One of the things that I noticed for me personally is that I've never liked fruits. The taste of it is okay. I don't really like the way it feels in my body. It makes me feel off, which I think is so interesting. I've never really enjoyed eggs in the morning. I don't know why I love an egg in the afternoon. I love an egg in the evening. It just doesn't work for me in the morning. I always feel a little bit nauseous. Who knew? Right?

The other thing that I've noticed is when I've added back ... I used to do a really non-fat, low-fat diet. As I've added back fat, as I've started getting older and going through perimenopause, I've noticed a huge difference in how I feel by eating more fat. You need to keep paying attention and keep adjusting your macros and the food that you eat in a way that serves you. Okay? My process of what we call 'Finding your fuel' and really learning what foods work with your body through that process is life-changing. You don't need to go through it with me. Right? You can go through it yourself. Really take a look at your diet.

Notice how you're feeling. Are you getting the results you want? Are you feeling great? Are you enjoying the taste of the food? Right? That's really important when it comes to understanding your fuel. Hunger, understanding hunger and when to eat and when not to eat, plus getting the right fuel is the magic bullet. That is the magic pill for losing weight. If you can eat only when your body requires for fuel and give it time to burn fat in between, and you're eating the food that helps regulate your hunger and makes you feel amazing, what more could you ask for? Right?

That is the secret sauce. That is the life I'm living. Right? The more I refine this … It's so interesting. Since I've been working on this class, I've been refining this more and more and more and more, and the better I feel. Right? The more weight I'd lose, the better I feel, the more fit I feel. It's fascinating. I'm loving it. Now, the last thing I want to talk about in this podcast and listen, I'm going to go into more detail on the second one. I know this is one of those long podcast, and I already cut this way down, but I just want to give you guys so much information because I know a lot of you aren't going to be able to join me, so I want to give you as much as I can on the podcast because you guys are awesome.

Have you written me a review yet? Just checking. Okay. The last thing I'm going to talk about is exercise. It's very, very important to me that you do not associate exercise with weight loss. There, I said it. I've already said this in my book that I wrote almost ten years ago, but do not exercise for weight loss. It's way too slow. You're going to quit too soon. Do not do it. Okay?

We do not exercise for weight loss. What we do exercise for is every other thing that will tune us in and make us healthy with our body. Okay? If we try and run on the treadmill in order to lose weight, we are going to be very frustrated with the results. If we run on the treadmill in order to be more healthy, we for sure will be doing that for ourselves, and we will continue to do it if we find a way to do it in a way that serves us. Why exercise? First of all, it's anti-aging. Duh. Let's do that. I've heard someone say before, "If you could take the benefits of exercise and put it in a pill, it would be a billion dollar industry", and yet, we get it for free and we don't do it, and there's so many reasons why we don't do it.

I have been studying that really intensely why don't people exercise. I think one of the main reasons why is people think the reason to exercise is weight loss. They do exercise, they don't enjoy it, and they don't lose weight, so they're like, "Why the heck am I exercising?" Right? "I don't enjoy it, and I'm not losing weight", and so they quit. I have an approach to exercise that is very effective for your health, doesn't require a lot of time, and is more of a mental and a physical tool rather than a weight loss tool. Okay? Exercise is anti-aging. It's bone-strengthening. I want my bones to be strong especially as I get older.

It improves your brain. Think about all of the oxygen that's getting to your brain when you exercise. There is so much evidence that it reduces your cancer risk to exercise. Why not do it especially in the way that I'm going to recommend that you do? Okay? One of the things that I have taught in exercise is a minimum baseline is that you need to have a minimum baseline for yourself for what you want to do for exercise to take care of yourself. One of the things that I recommend is that you do a minimum of five minutes, three times a week. Now, people have said to me, "That's not going to change anything. That's not going to do anything", but I want to promise you that it changes everything. Five minutes of exercise changes everything.

First of all, it takes you from a person who doesn't exercise to a person who does exercise. That is an identity-changing thing. Even if you get up, go the gym, go on the treadmill for five minutes and go home, you worked out today. Do not underestimate the power of that. Now, so many of us have been trained to believe that "Hey. I'm going to go run on the treadmill", and it will tell you how many calories you've burned. Right? If you run for a mile on the treadmill, it will tell you that you burned 140 calories, and so you may say, "Wow. That's amazing. I can eat this thing and then burn 140 calories." What you have to understand is "What would you have burned, how many calories would you have burned just sitting on the couch?" Right?

If you had just been sitting on the couch, you would have burned 20 calories. Really, you only burned 120 additional calories by going for a run. I want to lose a pound of fat. I just went on a mile run which for some of us ... I mean, that even to me, running for a mile sounds like the craziest thing. Why would anyone want to do that? That sounds awful to me. I'm at a natural weight, and I'm very fit, and I still have no desire to go run a mile. I certainly don't want to go run a mile if I'm only going to lose or burn 120 calories, because in order to burn a pound of fat, I have to burn 3,500 calories.

Now, I've only burned 120. I'm going to have to do many more miles in order to get to that 3,500, and here's the biggest problem. Most people go run that mile, and then they're like, "I'm starving. I'm going to eat everything in sight", because they've done the slow, steady mile, and afterwards, they're like, "I ran a mile. Now, I'm going to have a burger." That's how the mind works. If you are running to lose weight, you will cause yourself so many problems. Okay? Here's what I want to tell you. That five minutes that you work out has to be your minimum baseline, and you have to start seeing yourself as a exerciser first, and do that consistently.

What you will improve is your health. What I really want to highly recommend that you do is commit to those three five minutes, and then instead of increasing the time that you exercise, you would actually benefit much more by increasing the intensity. I want you to imagine that you have all this glucose. Right? Remember, we talked about glucose, that insulin has traveled, has taken out of your food and put in your liver, and put in your muscles. It's just sitting there, all that glucose, and any extra glucose that you had, it took to your fat. Now, if you can deplete those glucose stores, if you can completely deplete them, and you're not replacing them with food right away, meaning you're not drinking Gatorade, you're not drinking sugar as you're working out, your body will have to access some of your fat stores. This does not take an hour on the treadmill. Depleting your glycogen stores can take five minutes of very intense exercise. The more intense you can exercise for those five minutes, the better.

There is so much research about this, and I have a ton of it I'm going to share with you if you run through the program with me, but if you don't, you can research it. One of the things that you can research, it's called 'HIT exercise'. H-I-T. High intensity. Right? You want to read about that, and you want to evaluate where you are at your fitness level, where you are at your VO2 max, your muscle, you want to see where you are. Doing three days, five minutes of intense exercise will do more to improve your health and your fitness markers than long, slow cardio. I know that's a mind trip, but go online and research it. I'm not making this up. The other thing the intense exercise does is it impacts your glucose, which is what we want to do.

The other thing that's so amazing for me that I've noticed is when I go out and take a long walk which I do all of the time, I notice because I have my puppies, afterwards, I am hungry. When I do a HIT workout which is a very intense workout which takes me my blood pressure ... I want you guys to imagine during our HIT workout, your blood is pumping as fast as it can through your blood. It's like cleaning everything out. Okay? I want you to imagine like it's scrubbing the sides of your arteries and your veins because it's moving so quickly. It's scrubbing everything and cleaning everything up because you've created this intensity, versus the slow, meandering walk. What happens for me after that is I am a little bit sick. The last thing I want to do is eat a burger. Right? I feel a little bit expended. Right?

I'm done. I’m out. I'm on the ground. I'm sucking wind. The last thing I'm thinking about is eating. Okay? That is what I recommend for exercise, minimum baseline, really understanding that you can get many, many, many of the benefits of exercise with only a few minutes per week at an increased intensity. You will notice for example, if you spend that five minutes only doing push-ups, you will notice three times a week for five minutes if you only do push-ups. That's a pretty intense exercise for most of us especially if we try and do them when we're not on our knees. We get that maximum heart rate because we're pushing as hard as we can. We're expending that energy.

We're doing it quickly as hard and as fast as we can for a short period of time. You will notice that your ability to improve the number of push-ups that you do over six months will astound you. It's not because you've been working out all day. It's not because you work out for an hour a day. It's because you're doing push-ups three times a week. Test me on this one. See how many push-ups you can start with, and at the end of six months, after doing it only three times a week for five minutes, how much your strength increases, your ability to breathe increases, your ability to move fast increases, all of it. It literally affects your mitochondria. Right? It makes your muscles bigger. It stimulates your body to adapt and to improve.

Holy cow. I'm sorry. That was such a long one. I hope you guys loved it. You can see why I broke it into two parts. I'm just getting warmed up. We're going to talk about the whole other part of losing weight. I gave you the math this time. We're going to do the drama next week. We're going to talk about what happens in our mind and in our emotions and how important it is to have that commitment and have a great attitude when we're trying to lose weight.

Thank you so much for joining me. I look forward to sharing the rest of this information with you next week. Again, if you have any questions for me, as always, go to the comments. You can go to www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com/76. That's what this episode is. Ask me any question, and I will for sure answer it on an upcoming episode. Have a wonderful and amazing week, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to The Life Coach School Podcast. It would be incredibly awesome if you would take a moment to write a quick review on iTunes. For any questions, comments, or coaching issues you would like to hear on the show, please visit us at www.TheLifeCoachSchool.com.