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HELP! Why Can't I Lose Weight? · Fit for Hiking

• Hi, my name is Brady and I'm a longtime fitness professional and Midwest girl turned mountain living hiking addict. In combining my knowledge of fitness and passion for hiking, I've helped hundreds of women get lean and strong for the trails. Think of this as your onestop shop for both education and inspiration on all things female. Wellness, trail talk and adventure hiking, female metabolism, motherhood, nutrition, travel and fitness are all topics you'll hear discussed here. If you are outdoorsy and active, looking to level up your health, unlock your potential, and become inspired to live your most vibrant life, you're in the right place. You're listening to the Fit for Hiking podcast. Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Fit for Hiking podcast. As I am recording today, we're having another lovely rainy, gloomy day in the mountains. This is just par for the course here in the spring, we cannot catch a break lately. It's literally thunderstorming and or hailing every single day. And like I've mentioned, I think in another episode I work out in the sunroom. That's my office. It's a small mountain home. You got to create multiple purposes for every single space. And so every time it storms, I can't do anything. Like, I can't record. And I'm trying to bulk record, like, just batch these episodes before I head out on a month long trip in the van where I know it's going to be almost impossible to record. We'll see. Maybe I can make it happen, but between being in the van, using Starlink for WiFi and having a baby with us, who knows? So anyways, I'm trying to get all of this done here in the next few weeks before we leave, and this weather is just not cooperating. So you might hear a little pitter patter in the background and that's what's going on. But today I want to talk about when you're feeling completely stuck in regards to fat loss. I get a lot of women on the phone who are interested in our mountain metabolic coaching and their main goal is fat loss. And they're just like so frustrated and feeling stuck. And honestly, I get it. I spent years in the same situation and I know how frustrating it is, especially when you feel like you're doing all the right things and yet you're not getting the results that you think are warranted based on what you're doing. And it's just beyond discouraging, right? It just makes you want to throw in the towel. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. And as always, whenever we talk about anything weight loss oriented, I like to just give a disclaimer. If fat loss is a triggering or sensitive topic for you, I encourage you to skip this one. That's what we're going to be diving into today. So if you have any sort of sensitivity to that topic, I totally understand. And this is probably not the episode for. 1s I also want to recognize that not everyone who is pursuing fitness and health has fat loss goals. I think sometimes the two get lumped together. It's like, oh, if you're a woman and you work out, then you want to lose weight. That is absolutely not the case. And I mean, hopefully by now, if you've been following along with my content for a while, you know that my primary goal is to, like, empower women through fitness and health, to be able to do more and be more instead of just being smaller and things like that. But I do want to recognize that there are some people who have healthy fat loss goals. And 1s I went on a little bit of a fat loss journey a couple of years ago, and so I understand, like, if if you're not super confident in your current frame or you know that you have some unhealthy fat that you would like to get rid of, that's okay too. I don't think we need to demonize fat loss if we approach it from the right place. But also it's good to just recognize that not everyone who's working out is doing so for the goal of losing weight. Okay, so wanted to get those disclaimers out of the way. So in talking about this, it's hard to give, like, a blanket statement of advice when speaking generally on a podcast. 1s And if you're already doing all of these things consistently, like you're already nailing all of these things, or I guess since we're going to be talking about mistakes, you're not doing all of these things, then you may want some additional support. Hormonally and metabolically, I would say that that's like, probably a last resort. I think oftentimes we jump to that conclusion and not trying to invalidate anybody who that is their situation, because I talked to a lot of women who that is a very valid, real thing for them. But I just want to say it's not always the first thing that we need to look at. So we'll talk a bit more about that later, but let's get into it. Okay, so we're going to be talking about common mistakes that hinder fat loss. So if you're just like hitting plateaus, feeling stuck, it's just not happening. And you feel like, what on earth? I'm literally doing all the right things. Here are some of the most common mistakes that I've seen in working in fitness for the past decade. And I've also totally done myself, so I'm a normal person. Fitness coaches also struggle with these things. Just because we have the head knowledge doesn't mean it's always easy to implement. So these are very common. And we're going to go over seven things that could be hindering your fat loss. 1s One is not tracking food intake inconsistently tracking it or inaccurately tracking it. I see all of the above all the time. I think we're so quick to say, like, what I'm doing is not working, but we aren't really looking honestly at our food intake. Like, that is the number one thing. If you're hitting a fat loss plateau or you just aren't succeeding in what you're doing, that's the number one thing I would have you do, is track your calories for a few days. I know it's not fun, but if it means enough to you and you can do it from a healthy headspace, do it for a few days. Literally. You will gain so much insight from just doing this for a few days of your normal life. And even better if some of those days fall over a weekend. Because I definitely know in personal experience and with clients, that our eating from a Monday to a Saturday can look night and day different. So you really need to take an honest look at where you're at. Track every little detail. Don't skimp out on 1s a pour here of creamer and a little taste here of chocolate or all these things really do add up. So track accurately. Track consistently. Not just on your perfect days, but track on just real normal days. Like. You got to be taking an honest look at what your seven day average looks like instead of just your weekday average versus your weekend average. And then and not trying to and just try to be as accurate as you can because oftentimes we grossly underestimate how much we're eating, and that's just a normal human tendency. So if we're not keeping track of it, super to. They say you can't manage what you don't measure, and this is 100% the case with your intake. You can be eating a super healthy diet, like eating really good high protein, eating healthy fats, eating good complex carbs, eating lots of veggies. But if you're eating in a calorie surplus for your body, you still will not see fat loss. And I think that that's a really hard thing to grasp. We think, well, I'm eating so well. There have been times when I've eaten the healthiest I've ever eaten and I've gained weight because I'm eating a lot. I'm eating big portions. I'm eating maybe really high fat or whatever it may be. Your portions, your quantity is going to outweigh quality. As far as fat loss, that doesn't mean that food quality doesn't matter for things like gut health, satiety, how you feel overall health markers, blood sugar regulation. I hate it when there's like the two camps, right? It's like, well, you can eat whatever you want if it fits your macros or whatever, just eat whatever crap you want. Or the super other camp, which is like, 1s no processed foods, like perfect quality all the time. 2s It's like just these two that are kind of pitted against each other where it's like all about quality or all about quantity. And I am definitely in the middle where it's like both matter a lot because you need to have good food quality, otherwise it's going to be hard to stay in a calorie deficit. If fat loss is your goal, if you're eating these really high glycemic processed foods that don't fill you up for the long term, you're not eating high protein, you're not eating good volume foods like vegetables, then, yeah, you're going to probably struggle to maintain a solid calorie deficit, and you're going to feel like crap. Your energy is going to suck. You're not going to perform well in your workouts, and your gut health will suffer, which affects your hormones. It affects your mood. It affects so much. So I definitely like to be somewhere in the middle where it is the law of thermodynamics. You need to be in a calorie deficit. So quantity does absolutely matter, but quality is not something that we should just throw by the wayside. So if you can marry the two together, that's where the sweet spot is. Okay, so just tracking accurately. Seriously, start there. See where you actually are. You might be surprised, like, you know, I'll have my clients do this and some people are surprised to see, oh, I'm actually like really undereating. I'm having like 1200 calories a day. And then some people are quite on the opposite spectrum where maybe they're eating like 2500 calories a day. Nothing wrong with that. But if we want to elicit a fat loss response, then we know, okay, this is the average. This is where your maintenance is. Now we got to bring it down a little bit. Okay, moving on to number two. Not focusing on your Neat, which stands for Non Exercise activity. Thermogenesis. This is all of the little movements that make up your day that cause you to expend energy that you're not thinking like, oh, I'm exercising right now. So just walking around fidgeting, cleaning your house, running errands, walking through the grocery store, playing games, hiking, skiing, whatever it is that you're not thinking, okay, let me do this so I can burn calories. But it's just your body moving that is such a massive part of not only losing weight, but maintaining. If we are inactive outside of our workouts, it makes it really tough to have a high total daily energy expenditure. And if you are sedentary for all of the other hours of the day, other than your like 45 minutes to an hour that you work out, even if you work out seven days a week, you are still statistically considered to be a sedentary person, which is kind of a tough pill to swallow, right? I have always thought like, wow, I work out a lot, so I must be super active. But if your daily step count is like 4000 or less or really inconsistent, not very high, you're finding every possible way to not move your body, then your total daily energy expenditure will be low. And that just makes it tougher to lose fat, especially as you go on a fat loss journey. If it's a long journey over time, that's going to become even more important because your body's compensatory mechanisms are going to kick in to try to slow down fat loss. And that's when you need to really boost your meat because it's going to really help. 1s Burn calories without increasing your hunger. This is a tool I focus on a lot with my clients who have fat loss goals, because if I were to tell you like, okay, go run 6 miles, you'd probably be ravenous afterward. You'd be like super hungry all the time if you were just increasing your exercise, especially from cardio. But if I were to say, okay, let's just try to walk five, 6 miles a day, you're probably not going to be that much hungrier than normal. You're not working up an appetite in the same way if you're just increasing your movement in a non intense way. So focusing on meat, looking for those ways to sneak in movement. One, like really little one that I do just as a desk worker, I sit at home and I'm on my computer most of the day. I wish that I was out hiking. I think a lot of people think, based on my instagram, that I'm just like hiking and frolicking in the mountains all day and very much not the case. I'm sitting behind a computer pretty much all the time except on the weekends. So one thing I like to do is I take my phone calls standing and I pace around. That's something so small that you can do, like look for ways to do that. I'll also go on small walks, especially after my meals, like five to ten minutes even, just to help with blood sugar regulation after that meal and help with digestion. Just get moving and break up the amount of time that I'm sitting in the day because otherwise I just find that I sit a lot. So finding those little ways to move is so helpful. And like a little hack here. I see the walking pads on social media a lot, and I would love to get one. They're kind of expensive, so I don't have one yet. But if you don't have access to a treadmill or cardio equipment and you don't live super close to a gym like I don't, and you want to sneak in a little bit of just like, stepping or cardio or whatever it is during the day and it's crappy weather, then you can use tools like YouTube and look up walking workouts. Literally, they just have you, like, doing different step variations, marching in place, doing really, really low intensity movement. But I love doing that when it's like snowing and I can't get to the gym and I only have 30 minutes between meetings. It's just a nice way to get off of my butt and move around a little bit. Okay, so number three, eating back calories burned during workouts or thinking your workouts totally negate your bad eating habits. This is such a big one. I don't know what it is about humans, but mentally we think, oh, well, I worked out so now I can eat whatever the heck I want. And part of it is like, physiological yes, you're going to be a little bit hungrier, but a lot of it is that mental piece of feeling like you earned something. Right? 1s And I hate to say this, but spoiler alert, the calorie calculators on cardio equipment or on your watch or whatever or on these estimators are very, very incorrect. They have no way of really telling how many calories you as an individual are burning based on your body size, your muscle mass, your basal metabolic rate, all of these different components. So usually we're really grossly overestimating calories burned during workouts, and it's not nearly as much as we think or hope, but that should not be the goal. I don't think about calorie burn at all in my workouts anymore, and that has been one really freeing mentally, but also it takes away that component of, okay, well, I burned 400 calories in my workout, so now I'm going to eat that back. Well, that's going to make it really hard for you to lose fat if that's your goal, because you're probably eating back more than you actually burned, and now your deficit is negated. So we want to make sure that we're not using workouts to just burn a bunch of calories and think that you can out exercise a crappy diet. You just can't. If you're going to focus on one or the other for fat loss, it's going to be diet all day because a lot of people work out a ton and don't ever see weight loss. I did it for years, okay? Like, I'm talking tons of exercise, tons of running, tons of high intensity classes, and until I really buckled down and focused on a couple of other components. But one being like, actually being in a consistent deficit instead of just trying to outwork my bad eating habits on the weekends. Oh, man, that's a huge one. Okay, so don't think that you can cheat the system and just sweat more and burn more calories and that then you can just eat whatever you want. It doesn't work like that. Your body is not going to respond well, and you're just going to honestly 1s increase your stress load. Unnecessarily do. All right, number four being perfect Monday through Thursday and then going crazy on the weekends. This is such a big one. I struggled with this. It's still hard. Like, I'm not going to say that I never want to just let loose and have a lot of extra wiggle room on the weekends, but there's a difference between 1s going out to eat on the weekends, having maybe a few extra drinks, versus being super intense, tracking every calorie during the week and then literally binging on the weekends. And that's something that I really used to struggle with. So I don't say that lightly. It's hard. It's a tough cycle to break, and for me, it was about allowing myself to have more moderation during the week because I felt so mentally and physically restricted by Friday that it was like, finally, okay. And then I just completely would let loose and have a ton of drinks and be like, eating ice cream in bed afterward or getting fast food. And it just was such a vicious cycle. And it's going to be extremely tough to ever see physique change. Even if you're in a really good deficit Monday through Thursday, if you're eating like crap Friday through Sunday, or even just one or two days of the weekend, you're probably canceling out your deficit and you're just going to end the week either at maintenance or in a surplus even. It happens a lot. It happens really easily. Those calories add up really fast. So this is a big one, and it's a hard cycle to break, like I said. But truly finding moderation seven days a week, I think is the best approach. And it takes time. Like, it doesn't happen overnight. It took me a while to get this down, and I still struggle with it sometimes where I go a little bit overboard and I think, why did I do that? But I'm showing myself grace, and I'm so much better than I used to be at this. And this is a huge component that we focus on with mountain metabolic coaching, because when we restrict, when we tell ourselves, oh, I can't have this food, this list of foods, or I can't have, you know, any sweets, I can't have carbs, I can't have alcohol, whatever it is, we're so much more likely to fixate on those things. And at a certain point, our willpower runs out, and that's when we create this restricted binge cycle. 1s Okay. Number five is exercising, but then not prioritizing really any other facets of health. So this kind of loops into like thinking that you can out exercise a crappy diet but also your lifestyle matters a lot. You know, it's like this weird thing where there's this emphasis on exercise but then someone who exercises a ton may not prioritize sleep, they may go and binge drink on weekends. It's like a detox to retox situation, right? Like you're literally trying to exercise to provide your body with health but then you go and really slam your body with toxins with tons of alcohol or crappy processed foods over the weekend and the lifestyle piece has to be there. We can't compartmentalize this stuff. Eating healthily most of the time, working out a couple of days a week, going for walks, getting good quality sleep. Not overloading your body with alcohol or drugs or crappy, crappy processed foods all the time. It's important to look at all of this holistically because when we try to compartmentalize it, that's when we struggle to see progress. Because all of these things do matter and they all affect each other. They all affect your hormones, your satiety, your energy, your ability to comply to any sort of deficit, your ability to have good energy in the gym. So looking at your lifestyle closely and just do a little audit like say what am I doing right now? Is there anything that's really hindering my fat loss, progress or just my health? 1s Feel like a lot of people get into their thirty s and start to really reevaluate relationship with alcohol and that's something I've been doing lately and a lot of my clients have been processing is wow. Like. I'm crushing it during the week, but then I'll go and I'll have way too many drinks on Friday or Saturday, and then my next day is garbage. I feel like crap, and I'm kind of just standing in my own way by creating this cycle. And so doesn't have to be alcohol for you, but maybe there's another component of your life that you're like, man, my sleep needs some attention, or I'm, like, so stressed all the time time, and I'm not really addressing it. And then I go and just do a ton of workouts, and I think it's honestly not doing me any favors. So really doing a bit of a self audit, and maybe you need someone else to do that for you. That's a big part of what we do with our coaching. It's tough sometimes to really be honest with ourselves, but look at all the different facets of your health and see if there's anything that is holding you back. Number six kind of going off of what I was just saying is not having accountability or self honesty. 2s It's tough sometimes to bite the bullet and hire a coach or pay someone to help you. But when we pay, we pay attention and when we have someone that we know is checking in with us. 1s And we know that they are putting together a strategy for us and going to be checking in. We have that support, that external support that is huge. Like, I recently hired a business coach and it changed everything for me and this is just one area of self development, but man, they helped me grow in areas that I just wasn't willing to look out on my own or change. But when I had that support and I knew that they were going to be calling me and checking in and I knew that they were going to be watching my progress and asking if I was doing the things I did them. And I saw massive growth. And the same goes for health. If we just kind of like hide in the dark and say, well, I have these goals but we don't actually put them out there. We don't allow or really invest in ourselves to have somebody who knows what they're doing check in, give us a strategy, give us a plan, follow up troubleshoot, 1s we're just going to stand in our own way. We're going to continue to make the same excuses. We're going to continue to maybe focus on the things that we like focusing on, but really shine away from addressing the things that we don't want to address. So having that external support and the help to be honest about where we're struggling and getting stuck is massive. 2s Alright, so number seven, I want to just do a little caveat. I talked about this at the beginning, but this is one where I think oftentimes we like to jump straight to this and say, that's it, that's my problem. And then we skip the first six that I just talked about. I really want to encourage you to look closely at the first six that I just mentioned before. You just jump to the conclusion that you have some sort of metabolic or hormonal component because oftentimes it's actually just that we're not being really tight knit with the things that I was just talking about and we want to blame it on like hormones or metabolism. And I'm not saying again, we focus on this a lot with mountain metabolic coaching, hence the name. It's a huge part of what we do. So I'm not discounting that at all. But I do think that oftentimes we don't really look at things closely and we're not nailing the basics first before we look into more nuanced strategies. So that's my little caveat. Do with it what you will, but number seven is metabolic adaptation. So this is something that really only applies to the person who has been doing all of the above religiously for a long time, maybe even undereating chronically dieting, off and on. 1s Um, and over exercising, your stress threshold is like, maybe not very high. I think everybody has a different stress threshold, and so some people can do high intensity exercises often or run a lot and they're okay. Other people have really high lifestyle stress or just are type A or very tend towards being more anxious. That is me. And my stress threshold threshold is low. And so it's not like a one size fits all, but for some, all of these compounding effects of stress can really make a difference. And over time, your metabolism starts to compensate. So I want to first of all say that starvation mode is not a real thing, but it kind of goes in line with metabolic adaptation. Your body doesn't go into starvation mode. If that were true, then people would not truly starve. But what does happen is that your body is trying to compensate for a lack of energy over time. So if you're chronically dieting, skipping meals, eating 1200 calories a day, and then exercising on top of it or whatever, your body senses that as like stress and famine. So it's going to compensate by trying to expend less energy. So your total daily energy expenditure is going to go down. So it just makes it tougher to lose fat because your body is fighting you. It's literally trying to keep you alive. So it's a good thing, but it does make it harder, and this is natural. So if you're on a fat loss journey, it will get harder as you go. It's easier in the beginning. As your body's compensatory mechanisms kick in, it gets tougher. So that is kind of the sum of what metabolic adaptation is. It's your metabolism literally adapting to the lack of energy and high output potentially, if you're over exercising along with that low energy and your basal metabolic rate goes down. Okay, so this does happen from time to time, and it is a result of those things I was talking about before. And so we do see this sometimes with clients, and we have some strategies for bringing you out of that. And it is a process, it doesn't happen overnight, and it's usually an uncomfortable process because it requires you to slowly start eating more. So it's mentally tough for sure for that person because I've been there and it's not easy to allow yourself to eat more if you're the type that's really trying to be as thin as possible by undereating and over exercising. So that is number seven. And I just want to say this is something that we specialize in with Mountain Metabolic Coaching, we really go a step beyond most programs and personally troubleshoot. What's hindering your progress? 2s Is it metabolic adaptation or is it one of the first ticks? What's going on here on a deeper level? And we have a team of professionals, including a functional practitioner who specializes in gut and hormone health, physical therapist, and multiple health coaches and personal trainers. So we really like to look at health from a holistic standpoint instead of compartmentalizing or just saying, okay, you just need to eat less and move more when there might be something deeper going on. So I hope that this has all been helpful. If you're listening to this and you're like, man, I really know that I need to find some accountability from people who know what they're talking about. And this sounds like something I would be looking for. DM me at Ponytail underscore on a trail. That's ponytail underscore on a trail. And you can just shoot me a DM that says fat loss and I will point you in the right direction to get connected with our team. You can also check the show notes for the Mountain Metabolic Coaching application and that will put you right in the pipeline to get on a free discovery. Call with me and we can kind of talk through your goals where you're feeling stuck, the program in and of itself and see if it sounds like a good fit for you. So I hope that this has been insightful in the category of where you're feeling stuck, why you can't lose weight. Let me know if you guys have any questions and if you want any other topics kind of similar to this, and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Fit for Hiking podcast. As always, I hope it leaves you feeling inspired and informed on how to take your health and adventure into your own hands. For more content like this, be sure to follow along with my daily posts at ponytail underscore on a trail that's ponytail Underscore on a Trail. You can also stay up to date on my new episodes being released at fit Underscore for hiking and find more free resources@ponytailonatrail.com. Happy and healthy trails.