Ep. 257: How to Lose Weight

Ready to change your mind about weight loss? Grab The 5-0 Method to lose all the weight you want and keep it off forever.

Today I’m breaking it down into the TWO THINGS you most need to know in order to successfully lose weight (especially when you’re over 50).

It’s hard to navigate through all the hype on the internet about how to lose weight, right?  That’s why I’m cutting straight to the bottom line – SCIENTIFIC FACTS – in today’s episode of the Fitness Matters podcast. And I’m breaking it down into the TWO THINGS you most need to know in order to successfully lose weight (especially when you’re over 50).

What You’ll Learn:


👉  The SCIENCE of weight loss
👉  The DIFFERENCE (and similarities) between “being healthy” and losing weight
👉  The MISSING PIECE of most weight loss programs
👉  How MENOPAUSE changed everything

Transcript

You're listening to the Fitness Matters Podcast with Pahla B, and this is episode number 257: "How to Lose Weight". Welcome to the Fitness Matters Podcast, where every week we talk about the fitness matters that matter to you. I'm Pahla B, YouTuber, certified life and weight loss coach, soon to be author and your best, middle aged, fitness friend. Are you ready to talk about the fitness mindset that matters to you? Me too. Let's go. Before we dive into today's topic, here's a quick message about the Pahla B Wellness Over 50 Book Club, in partnership with Chirp audiobooks. Our latest pick is The Mindful Path to Self Compassion by Christopher Germer, which you can grab at a steep discount with no monthly subscription fees at chirpbooks.com/Pahla. That's P-A-H-L-A. While you're there, be sure to click the follow button to get exclusive access updates and register for the live book club event on Friday, October 21st. I'll see you there.

Well, hello, goal friends. It is so good to be here with you today and I am so excited to talk about how to lose weight. You guys, there are two things that you need to know in order to lose weight successfully. Number one is that you need to know the science, and number two is that you need to know your self. Let's start by tackling the science of it. Both of these things, actually, knowing the science and knowing yourself are incredibly simple, doesn't make them easy, and we all have the tendency to over complicate them. And that's why I wanted to make this episode today is so that you can really hone in on the absolute basics and start to kind of clear away all of the extra noise because there's plenty of noise out there. I know you've noticed it and that's why I want to talk first about the science.

The science, my friends, is incredibly clear and incredibly simple, and here it is. In order to lose weight, you need to eat in a caloric deficit. Let's tackle a couple of different things about that because the first thing that I hear all the time, y'all come at me. I mean that so nicely. You don't actually come at me. But you come to me with sentences of concern such as, "Well, but what about eating healthy foods? I eat really healthy foods and I can't seem to lose weight." I totally understand that. Some of my clients who struggled the most were the ones who were eating healthy foods because here's why, we have it in our heads and this is noise rather than science. We have it in our heads that healthy foods are going to help us lose weights. Weights, nope, just one or all of them.

But in any event, the thing about healthy foods is that healthy foods still have calories. They have plenty of calories. Some healthy foods, I'm thinking of avocados really specifically, like an avocado. It's relatively small, has 200 calories. Healthy foods do not, in and of themselves, make you lose weight. Foods don't burn fat, foods burn calories. Just let me clarify this one really quickly. When you eat food, one of the biggest energy burns that you have is simply from eating food. Every time you eat food, your body has to go to work in order to digest that food. So I've read differing actual numbers, and I think it might depend on what kind of food you eat. For example, protein has to go through more processes in order to turn into energy, so eating protein probably burns more calories than eating something that would be a simple sugar that your body can use right away.

In any event, apparently your brain uses approximately 20% of your energy and digesting your food also uses somewhere between 20 and 25% of the total energy output of your day. Don't quote me on that one. I did not look that up just to talk about it during this podcast. I read that quite some time ago and it could be wrong, so don't quote me on that part. You can quote me on the caloric deficit though. That one is 100% science. So here's the thing about eating healthy foods is that you could be either overeating from your slight caloric deficit or you could be under eating from your slight caloric deficit. Both of those things are going to create a situation in which you are not losing weight even though you're eating healthy foods. The other thing that y'all come at me nicely with is, "But I'm intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting makes you lose weight, right?"

No, it doesn't. It doesn't make you lose weight. Intermittent fasting, I was just reading the science behind this very recently. There are indications that intermittent fasting can be good for your health in certain ways, but in and of itself it does not make you lose weight. It can help you lose weight if you are eating during your eating window in a caloric deficit. How about that? The only proven way to lose weight, I'm going to keep saying it again and again and again. The scientifically proven way to lose weight is to eat in a caloric deficit. Both eating healthy foods and intermittent fasting can be good for your health and I'm going to clarify that one. Actually, let me clarify that one right now. I was going to clarify it later, but I'm going to do it right now because the next thing I'm going to talk about may or may not be related to do your health.
The thing about being healthy is that it's fantastic for you. It's right there in the sentence. Being healthy is healthy. You do absolutely, 100% want to aim for being healthy. Being healthy by eating healthy foods or intermittent fasting because it has some health benefits, I'm trying to remember the exact wording. There's a thing called telomeres and I kind of understand them and I need to do more reading to be able to explain it to you better than this. But there's a thing called telomeres that can, not necessarily predict your lifespan, but the health of the telomeres can indicate some of the risks that you might have or might not have for your health overall, that intermittent fasting can increase the health of these things. I didn't explain that well at all. I'm going to do some more reading before I talk to you anymore about this, but let me just leave it at this.

That intermittent fasting has been shown to have some health benefits. Is it the only way to be healthy? Absolutely not. Is it a way to increase your health? Possibly, yes, it is. However, one of the other ways to increase your health is to eat in the slight caloric deficit that gets you to a healthy weight because being a healthy weight truly is one of the healthiest things that you can do. So many of the risk factors that you or all of us could have, I don't mean you like pointing fingers at you personally. But us, as human beings in general, so many of the risk factors that we have are related to being overweight or obese. Being a healthy weight in and of its itself reduces so many of your health risks. Having said that, once you are a healthy weight, there are other ways to be even healthier than that.

Some of those ways are doing things like eating within a window, which is not necessarily intermittent fasting approved. Intermittent fasting, generally speaking, means that you eat in an eight hour window and fast for the other 16. I think that's kind of what is considered the standard. There are other ways to intermittent fast. For example, I eat everything that I'm going to eat in about a 10 to 12 hour window, but I've never called it intermittent fasting. I just call it my day. So there are ways of being healthy at a healthy weight that can continue to reduce your risks. Things like exercising regularly. Things like quitting smoking. Honestly, I was reading somewhere that if you smoke, quitting smoking reduces your risks of dying earlier than necessary. I don't remember what the number was, but it was basically almost everything else you could do combined is how much quitting smoking will help you.

Quitting smoking is absolutely, hands down, one of the best things that you can do for your health. Exercising regularly is the other one, and both of those are within being at a healthy weight. The other thing that you might come at me with, "But I'm eating keto, or I'm eating low carb or I'm eating vegan. Or I'm eating in this one particular way and that's going to help me lose weight." Again, what I'm going to tell you is that that can help you with your health, but it does not make you lose weight. The only way to make your body lose weight is by eating in a slight caloric deficit, and I realized that when I came at this podcast. I started by saying eating a caloric deficit, and I want to clarify that eating in a caloric deficit is what I would consider like generic weight loss advice.

Literally, everybody on the planet loses weight when they are eating in a caloric deficit. We're actually really specifically, I am, talking about how to lose weight as a woman over 50, and that's where the word slight comes into play. Let me come back really quickly to the keto, low carb, vegan, et cetera, eating in a particular way does not make you lose weight. The reason that you might have weight loss success from things, for example, starting to eat healthy or starting to eat keto or starting to eat low carb or starting to intermittent fast. You might have fantastic weight loss success when you start doing these things because suddenly you are eating in a caloric deficit. You might be eating in a way that is so different from what you were eating before and it's not the kind of food you are eating, it's the amount of food you are eating.

The amount is always what drives weight loss. The type of food you are eating drives other things, for example, your general overall health. It also could drive your ability to eat in the slight caloric deficit because of things like satiety and fullness and feeling energetic. Healthier, I'm just going to say it like that, healthier foods feel better in your body. Coming back to that protein thing, one of the reasons why eating keto or low carb might help you is because eating, I'm just going to say generically, more protein. That is literally the worst kind of diet advice any person can ever give you without knowing how much protein you are eating right now. I have no idea if you need to eat more. There is an amount of protein that is considered a standard, that is good for you, good for your health, good for producing muscle building activity, helping with satiety and fullness.

The kind of rule of thumb is that for every pound of body weight you have, you want to be eating one gram of protein. I will tell you, for me personally, I am a person who really likes carbs much more so than protein. Eating my body weight in pounds, in grams of protein, it's not my favorite way of eating. I do my best, again, within my calorie parameters. I do my best to eat as healthfully as I can because I am a healthy weight, so I am doing what I consider those add-ons. I quit smoking 20, 27 years ago. I do exercise regularly. I do eat as healthfully as I can. I don't count my macros in general, but I'm aware of trying to eat a relatively balanced diet. I am aware of the amount of sugar I eat, the amount of what I consider junk food.

I personally, within my healthy weight, have found what I consider to be a healthy balance of junk food versus healthy food. That's kind of an ongoing thing with me, I'm always looking at, can I make this one other tweak here? Is this a sustainable habit to eat this way or eat that way? Within my healthy weight, there is certainly wiggle room to eat even healthier than I do. However, eating healthy is not the driver of weight loss. Healthy foods are great for you, great for your health. Other healthy habits, great for you, great for your health. Do not make you lose weight. How to lose weight, being the topic of our conversation today. How to lose weight is by eating in a caloric deficit and really specifically for women over a 50 eating in a slight caloric deficit. Let's talk about why that word slight is so important.

Here's more science. The thing about being menopausal is that your body has fundamentally changed as soon as you start going through menopause. The thing about menopause is that your body has been predestined since the day you were born to go on this journey. That at some point during puberty, your ovaries, which you were born with and unless you have them removed, you will die with. They have been in your body your entire life possibly, but they didn't do much until you went through puberty. At puberty, your hormones suddenly said, "Hey, here's what we're going to do now." They started producing more estrogen. Estrogen changed your body in ways that were relatively physically obvious and also in lots of ways that we're not physically obvious, that we simply took for granted. As your body stops production of estrogen, and I want to be really clear here that your production of estrogen has always been cyclic. And by the way, I don't know what that would be, adverb. It's not an adverb of the word cycle, meaning that you produce estrogen in a cyclic. You have never produced a steady amount of estrogen.

It's not like your ovaries started producing estrogen and they've been producing estrogen at like a 100% and then they stop. Your body has always produced estrogen in a cyclical manner, meaning that sometimes you have more, sometimes you have less. It was never a continuous stream. However, within that cycle, you were producing relatively regular amounts. Sometimes you were producing at, let's just call it 50, I don't know and sometimes you were producing at 25. But it always went between 50 and 25, 50 and 25, 50 and 25, for example. That's not incredibly accurate. Again, don't quote me on this, but it gives you an overall view of what I'm trying to say. That as your body ceases production of estrogen, it starts to do this thing where if it was producing at 50 and 25 to produce your regular menstrual cycle, all of a sudden it is spurting at 105 and then zero and then 78 and then 15.

All of a sudden your body is doing this thing where it is not going the same cycle that it used to and it is also producing different amounts than it used to. This is allegedly because we don't know for sure the cause of symptoms, like hot flashes, migraines, insomnia. All the different moodiness, breast tenderness, all of the different weird body stuff, for lack of a better way of saying it. That goes on when you are perimenopausal. They think, scientists, that it is possibly because of your estrogen really specifically being produced in varying amounts that are different from the varying amounts that your body used to produce. It's why your body feels so weird when you are going through menopause. It's doing weird things. Now I say the word weird and what I want to really assure you here is that actually is normal.

What your body is doing is exactly what your body is supposed to be doing. It just feels really uncomfortable, it's unfortunate, it's uncomfortable, its inconvenient lots of times. However, it is very natural. It is the thing that your body is supposed to be doing. Now, having said that, once you are, I'm going to say, menopausal and let me just actually explain that really quickly. I did a video a while ago where I talked about being menopausal for somewhere between a third and a half of your life depending on how long you live. And I had a couple people comment like, "No, no, no, menopause only lasts a couple of years." And I just want to clarify that when I'm saying the word menopausal, I'm talking about really everything from the menopause transition of your hormones sputtering to a stop as they do, and then the rest of your life. When you don't have periods anymore and when you don't produce estrogen at the levels that you used to. Just so you know, just to clarify, I always talk about how you don't have estrogen anymore, and that's not entirely true.

You used to produce significantly more estrogen than you do once you are menopausal, but you still have estrogen in your body. Both men and women always have some estrogen circulating because estrogen does so many other things besides just give you a period. It's just that it doesn't produce in an amount that would give you a period anymore. You still have estrogen. It's almost nonexistent and it comes from a different resource. It doesn't come from your ovaries anymore. You produce estrogen in other places by the way. You produce estrogen in your brain and you can also produce it from fat cells. I don't entirely understand the production of estrogen in other places, so this is beyond the scope of this podcast, but I found it very fascinating. Because of course, men don't have ovaries and they still have estrogen. So that's why I know that you produce it in other places, which is why I even looked this up, and therefore that is how it exists in both men and women.

It's not just your ovaries that produce it. But here's the thing, that when you do not have as much estrogen as you used to have, it fundamentally changes a lot of things in your body. Estrogen, all these years, has been doing more than just giving your periods. Scientists don't know exactly how this works, but apparently estrogen has been protecting your heart for a long time. It has also been protecting your bones. Estrogen, one of the things that it does has been regulating the entire bone cycle, where you produce new bone cells to help give you bone density. And then the bone life and then the bone cell death, where your body reabsorbs those cells and then produces more. Estrogen has been regulating that your whole life. So as you are finished being menopausal, this is what I was talking about, about how you're going to be menopausal the rest of your life. You don't ever get your periods back.

It's not really a pause of your menses. It is a [inaudiblestop. You stop producing periods, so therefore you are menopausal for the rest of your life. The worst of the inconvenient symptoms, yes, generally speaking for, I'm going to say most women. I just read a statistic about this, about how some women will continue to have varying, I'm going to call them, inconvenient or uncomfortable symptoms like hot flashes or migraines for the rest of their lives. I think it was most women, meaning 50% or more. The inconvenient symptoms only last, I think the average was seven years. Some women will continue to have some of those inconvenient symptoms forever, and I apologize to you if you are one of those women. And then here I am on a podcast being like, "Oh, well, most women don't have this," and you're like, "Thanks Pahla. Some of us do."

It's true. Some of us do have symptoms that are inconvenient and could be transitory. Some of us could have those for the rest of our lives. The way that I've understood it though is that the worst of it is during the menopause transition when hormones are fluctuating much more so than they were the rest of your lives or life. So you tend to get at least some relief if you have a lot of hot flashes during the menopause transition. Even if you continue to have them, they will be less often, they will be less severe. You will get some relief, going to offer you that, still might not sound like the nice thing to say when you are the one who is continuing to go through it. But here's what I'm going to tell you. One of the things that estrogen has been doing that none of us ever really paid much attention to because it was just going on in the background.

One of the things that estrogen does is it attenuates cortisol. Let's talk really quick about what cortisol is. We've all heard it in the popular media being touted as this stress hormone. That's not necessarily bad. Like all things in your life, there is basically a bell curve for everything being good, good, good, good, good, right up until it's operating at peak efficiency and then there's a point of diminishing returns. You are on the downside of the curve where it's not doing good for your body anymore. It's not necessarily doing damage, but it's not doing good for your body. Cortisol actually does damage for your body if you have too much of it over a long period of time. Cortisol, in the short term, in the right amounts, does great things for your body. It's actually a helpful hormone like all your hormones. It does a job, actually does several jobs, and then it's supposed to stop doing that job.

As far as I understand it, every single process in your body operates in this kind of cyclic nature. Again, the word cycle being said is cyclic nature. Cortisol is meant to rush out and do a job and then recede because it has been attenuated or stopped from another hormone. Generally speaking, this is how hormones work. Your body sends them out to do something and then it'll send out a different hormone to tell it to stop doing that thing like, "Okay, we're good here. Go ahead and turn off the spigots." So one of the things that estrogen has been doing is telling cortisol, "Okay, we're good." Without estrogen to tell cortisol to stop doing its job, cortisol will continue doing the job, for a short amount of time is actually really good. What cortisol does is it reduces inflammation by raising your blood sugar and raising your blood pressure.

Again, both of those things sound bad because we think about them. They've been told to us in popular media like, "Oh, that's bad for you." It's actually really good for you in the short term. Anytime you have ever felt like energetic and ready to go and like, "Woo, I feel awesome today, I'm going to tackle the world." It's because you had slightly elevated blood sugar and slightly elevated blood pressure. Those two things in tandem, in the right amounts help you feel amazing. Over the long haul however, your blood pressure and blood sugar are supposed to act in a cyclic nature. They have a cycle of going up and down and up and down. You are supposed to feel energetic and then I'm going to say lethargic because that's the word that's coming to me, but you're supposed to sleep is really what I mean. You are supposed to feel energetic sometimes, and then you are supposed to feel tired sometimes, and that's when you rejuvenate yourself and you come back and you feel energetic again. So your blood sugar and your blood pressure are supposed to go up and down.

When cortisol stays in your bloodstream over a long period of time and you have elevated blood sugar and elevated blood pressure, over the course of time, those things actually wear you down. Again, you're supposed to recede from that. You're supposed to recover from that. When you have elevated blood sugar over time, eventually because your body hasn't been able to recede the blood sugar, it stops even trying. This is what we call insulin resistance. This is why women over 50 have a propensity to develop insulin resistance is because we don't have as much estrogen as we used to. Estrogen tells cortisol to stop doing its job, which means that estrogen actually helps your body do all of its other processes such as the things that insulin does or reduces your blood pressure. Without estrogen doing that job anymore, cortisol can run rampant in your body, and here's what I'm going to tell you about that. It doesn't have to.

We've all seen those ads on YouTube, maybe you haven't, but YouTube is shoving it in my face right now. The ads where it says, "When you go through a menopause, estrogen declines and cortisol increases." Cortisol doesn't have to increase. The reason cortisol would increase is because you are continuing to do the same things that you've been doing. As you go through menopause, when estrogen changes its job, you have to change your habits. This is why people talk about how weight gain is "inevitable as you get older". No, it's not. The reason you gain weight during and after menopause is because you are continuing to do the things that you did when you were in your twenties and thirties and forties. And your body just is reacting differently to those things, because it doesn't have estrogen to tell cortisol to stop doing its job.

Thank you, cortisol. We're done here. You, however, have the ability to attenuate cortisol without estrogen, and here's how. Now we're going to talk about the 5-0 method, my friend. The science of weight loss is that you need to eat in a caloric deficit. However, as women, we have been told our entire lives that what that means is that we need to eat less and move more. Eating less and moving more is no longer the solution. The 5-0 method, which is my completely free weight loss method, that really explains all of this in written form and also gives you a lot of examples and tells you exactly the math to figure out how to eat in this slight caloric deficit, how to exercise moderately, which is what I'm going to talk about next. You can find the 5-0 method on my website, pahlabfitness.com, and it explains how to basically attenuate cortisol. When cortisol runs rampant into your body, the overall stress, the long term what you might even call chronic stress syndrome that happens, is that you begin to store fat.

Generally speaking, we start storing fat in our midsection, in our abdomen, in our belly in a way that we didn't used to, because we are continuing to eat less and move more. Both of those things might have worked when you were younger. However, now what we want to do is offer our bodies the slight caloric deficit and the moderate amount of exercise that helps your body keep cortisol in a cycle. You actually want cortisol. You produce cortisol cyclically every single day. You have elevated cortisol every single morning when you wake up on purpose so that you can feel energetic and get going with your day. At the end of your day, cortisol would very naturally recede. It's part of the reason why you can sleep is because cortisol goes down. You have less blood sugar. You have less blood pressure, then you feel tired.

This is how cortisol is supposed to work. Cortisol is one of the things that helps you with your circadian rhythm, helps you go to sleep and wake up. If you are exercising too much and eating too little and helping your body stay in that chronic stress syndrome situation, where you have elevated cortisol. At the end of your day, if you have elevated cortisol, it's not necessarily that you feel energetic. You probably feel physically tired because it's time to go to sleep and your body would like to rest in repair, but you also feel jittery and your brain is going a mile a minute because of that cortisol. This is part of why menopausal women have trouble sleeping. It's part of why we have insomnia. This chronic stress like syndrome of symptoms that makes it difficult to sleep. That makes it difficult to lose weight. That makes it difficult to do all the things that you need to do in your life and feel good in your body and feel healthy.

This is where the 5-0 method comes into play. By taking that whole eat less, move more mentality and thinking about exactly what you can do to work with your menopausal body. It will help you, I'm not going to say eliminate all the symptoms. The fact is you still have estrogen doing its thing. It is it producing a lot, it's producing a little. It's kind of sputtering out like a car running out of gas. Sometimes you have that burst of estrogen and sometimes you're running on fumes of estrogen. As your body is going through this transition, you are absolutely still going to, I said absolutely but what I mean is possibly, have some of the symptoms. What you can do, the things that you control are things like eating the exact right amount so that you're not in too much of a deficit, which creates stress in your body.

You're not exercising too much, which creates that stress in your body. You're hydrating just so that your body can operate at peak efficiency. The fact is you can be dehydrated and your body can be doing all of its things. There's a chance if you are like me, that you've actually been dehydrated most of your life and your body has been just fine. The thing that we're doing by hydrating properly is just giving our body the best chance to operate at peak efficiency. Peak efficiency, here in our fifties and later, doesn't mean what it used to mean. And because your systems are all kind of slowing down and being less efficient anyway, because of the general aging process. Offering your body the right amount of water can just help it relax. By helping your body sleep as much as possible, having a routine. I am not offering you that you're going to sleep amazingly, but you might notice two things.

Number one, just the Pavlovian effect of going to bed at the same time every night and getting up at the same time every morning. Your body will feel tired. Your brain will feel tired because it's a routine, because it's a habit. You might also be able to reduce the cortisol in your body and let your cortisol do its natural cyclic rhythm because you are not eating too little and exercising too much. By offering your body this beautiful, moderate, slight caloric deficit, moderate amount of exercise, you could attenuate the cortisol so that you will sleep better. I'm not offering you that as a guarantee. There's just the possibility that you could sleep better when you do all of the things in the 5-0 method. And then my friends, the exercising moderately, when you are not exercising too much, putting your body in that chronic stress syndrome state, your body will attenuate the cortisol.

It will help you lose weight. It will help you feel good. You will probably notice that you have more energy because you are not in that chronic state of stress. When your body operates in its normal cyclical nature of energetic and then tired, and then you get to rest and thoroughly repair your body by being able to sleep hopefully slightly better. You'll actually feel the energy that you have. The thing about being in that chronic stress syndrome state is that you do kind of weirdly feel, I'm going to call it energetic, because you have the elevated blood pressure. You feel energetic. I know what this feels like in me when I'm stressed. You're totally wired but exhausted at the same time, that doesn't feel good. And because it's all the time, you actually never feel energetic and you never feel tired.

You just constantly feel jittery and yucky. You'll notice as you offer your body these situations in which it can attenuate the cortisol. You'll notice that you actually feel really energetic sometimes and you have that beautifully tired feeling of, "Oh my gosh, now I can go to sleep." At other times, you will operate in that way where you're not at that low grade [inaudible 00:37:09] all the time. Yes, that was a scientific word. I don't even know how you would spell that G-L-P-H-C-H maybe. But operating in that constant low grade yucky feeling feels constant, low grade yucky. When you can get back to your natural cycle of sometimes feeling energetic and sometimes feeling tired, you'll notice that feeling energetic feels amazing. It's not necessarily that you had, like we all say, more energy than before, you probably have the same amount of energy that you ever had.

It's just that you get a relief from that energetic feeling and you get a relief from the tired feeling. And then my friends, that was a lot of science. Let's talk about how knowing yourself is so important on this journey. This is where the 5-0 method really shines above other weight loss methods. Yes, it gives you the science to understand, "Hey, here's how your menopausal body is different than it used to be, and here's what you can do." But when you know yourself, you will have, in my opinion, the most important tool in your toolkit for guaranteed weight loss success. When you take the time every day, first of all, to just even be aware of the thoughts in your brain. Even that little bit of self-awareness and self care, I don't know. Even me talking about it right now, I love it so much.

Some of this is a really Pavlovian response. It really is a lot like having a bedtime routine. Having a journaling routine where I am going to write out some of the junk that's in my head and I'm going to get it out of my head. It just feels like such a relief knowing that I have that as part of my routine every single day, that I will take time to love myself like that. Even knowing that reduces my stress, reduces the pressure that I have in my life. Knowing that I will every single day, make time to love myself and care for myself feels so beautiful right there. It's taking care of some of your stress and then the actual act of self-awareness. Journaling and seeing what's in your brain and understanding that these are just thoughts. These are thoughts that are slowing me down. These are thoughts that are making me feel terrible, and they're all optional.

That work? Oh my goodness, my friends, I don't know if I can even tell you if you are not currently doing this. I don't even if I can even explain to you how much stress this will relieve from your life. Knowing yourself is the secret sauce to doing some of the things that estrogen used to do. Estrogen used to help you with your stress, and now it's up to you. You eating in that slight caloric deficit. You exercising moderately instead of too much. You taking care of your body and your brain in a way that we used to just rely on estrogen. You taking this whole process and making it your own by understanding the science and really deeply understanding yourself. My friend, you're guaranteed to lose weight. This is how it works. You know all of the parts now. And now, it's just a matter of putting them into play, and let me talk to you about that really quickly.

It's not the point of this podcast, but I do feel like this is one of those times where you hear this and you're like, "Oh my gosh, let's go." And then you start to get going on any of the things, and then it's hugely overwhelming. And I want you to understand that all of the five parts of the 5-0 method where you eat in the slight caloric deficit, you drink the right amount of water, you have a bedtime and waking routine, you exercise moderately, and you manage your mind. Each of those five parts has its own moving parts and it can feel incredibly overwhelming to try and figure out all the moving parts from all of the parts and then all of the moving parts from the moving parts, from the parts. It's like that old riddle. When I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives and every wife had seven cats and every cat had seven kits and every sack had seven... It was kits, cats, sacks, and wives. That's what it was. How many were going to St. Ives? It was one. It was me.

But it's that whole seven type seven times, seven times seven thing. Don't get bogged down in that. When you get started, here are the two things that you need to know. You need to know the science, and you need to know yourself. Everything else is details, and you will get there on your way to St Ives on your way to the guaranteed weight loss that is waiting for you. You knowing the science and knowing yourself is all you need. Every single thing, all of the moving parts is figureoutable. Every single one of them. You can come to each individual one and look at, "Okay, I'm having problems eating my calories. What's the science? What's myself?" The science is that I need to eat in a slight caloric deficit.

The self is that this feels hard, and I have thoughts about this, and here is my procedure to find my thoughts and decide if they're helpful. The two step tool. It's included in the 5-0 method. I'm not going to get bogged down in that right now, but you can go listen to episode 89 where we talk about mindset management. Everything that you need is in the science and in yourself. My friends, go lose weight. You've got this. You've totally got this, and I really hope that today was helpful. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.

If you are getting a lot out of the Fitness Matters podcast and you're ready to take it to the next level, you are going to love the Get Your Goal Coaching and Accountability Group. We take all the theory and knowledge here on the podcast and actually apply it in real life on your real weight loss and fitness goals. It's hands on, it's fun, and it works. Find out more at pahlabfitness.com/get-your-goal. And let's get your goal.

Listen to the full episode here, and be sure to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Originally aired October 9, 2022
Today I’m breaking it down into the TWO THINGS you most need to know in order to successfully lose weight (especially when you’re over 50).
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Meet Your Host

Mindset expert and certified life coach Pahla B knows a thing or two about changing your mind to change your weight and your life. She’s the creator of The 5-0 Method, Amazon-best selling author of the book “Mind Over Menopause,” and former yo-yo dieter who has cracked the code on lifelong weight maintenance. Join Pahla B each week for the personal insights, transformative mindset shifts, and science-backed body advice that can help you lose all the weight you want and keep it off forever.