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The Problem With “Eat Less Move More” for Former Female Athletes · The Embodiment Lab

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's always eat less, move more, but it's never how does that actually look for your body so that you're not just training your freaking ass off for no reason and basically starving yourself to look in the mirror six months from now and look exactly the same.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the embodiment lab.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Addy, and I have about 11 minutes to record this episode before I hop on my next call.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we are gonna pump this out.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, this is a topic that gets me freaking fired up because it pisses me off when people think that it is as simple as eat less and move more.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna dive into why it's not as simple and what you need to do instead to make sure that you're actually getting results from the effort that you're putting in.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's not about just putting in the maximum amount of effort, burning the most calories, eating the least amount of calories that gets your body results that makes you lean, that helps you build muscle, but it's actually making sure that effort is actually directed toward specifically what your body needs and specifically what your goals look like so that you do achieve the results that you are after, and you're not just wasting your time and energy and feeling completely defeated despite how hard you're working.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: So if your body, like let's talk about your internal state for a second.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: Eat less, move more works great if you're actually doing it correctly.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: But what ends up happening is that most people end up taking this to the absolute max.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: They hear eat less and they think, okay, cool.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Let me slash my calories as much as possible.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let me skip meals, skip breakfast, eat the low calorie meals and the low calorie snacks and try and get by by eating close to nothing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're starving and they're miserable.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're also adding on top of that, okay, move more.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Let me do tons of cardio.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Let me burn a ton of calories.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Let me do multiple workouts in a day.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Let me work out seven days a week.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to take rest days.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: I want to move.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: It says move more.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get in 15, 20,000 steps a day.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do a whole bunch of movement.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And what ends up happening is you know the drill.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you've listened to this podcast for long enough, you know all of that slows down your metabolism.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: So eat less, move more becomes obsolete when you've taken it to the max, and that's where you've lived for months, even years at this point in your life, to where now your metabolism is moving at a snail's pace.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it's no wonder that it's not actually working for you anymore.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: It has slowed down because it's trying to conserve energy.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Your body is stressed out.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: You have taken what a simple strategy that should have been effective, and you have maximized the crap out of it to where now your body's not responding to it anymore.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I don't blame it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: But why this doesn't work is because a lot of the times what people don't consider before eating less and moving more is their internal state and making sure that their body is actually healthy and optimized and at a place where it can respond.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean looking at things like your metabolism, your energy, your digestion, your blood sugar, your hormones, all of these things matter.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Your sleep, your stress, all of this matters because if those things are not optimized, they are out of whack, things are off in your body, it's going to make it very difficult for your body to actually respond.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: So there are definitely times when you are in a deficit, you are eating less, you are working out, you're doing cardio, you're getting your steps in, you're doing all the things, and your body's not responding because one or a few of these things are out of whack and they're not actually working for you.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: When what your body needs is it needs to be able to trust you, it needs to be able to trust food, it needs muscle, it needs all of these things in order to be in tip-top shape and primed and actually able to add muscle tissue to your body in order to get leaner and lose body fat.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're like, Addy, what the heck are you talking about?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll give you an example.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: If you feel like you go out to a restaurant and because you ate restaurant food that's a little bit more processed, a little bit higher in oils, sodiums, carbs, whatever, then you feel like you instantly gain weight, you feel really bloated, you feel gross, disgusting, inflamed, you feel like your body just responded to the meal.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why that happens is because if you are used to consuming a small amount of food or less than what your body actually needs, then your digestion actually slows down.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Your digestion, like your gut, your intestines, will secrete this digestive enzyme that helps to produ uh it helps to break down food.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: So whenever you are not consuming enough food, your body will actually produce less of those enzymes because it's getting fed less food.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not going to produce as many.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so whenever you do have more food that enters your digestive tract, it doesn't have enough of those enzymes to actually break down that food.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And so your digestion becomes less efficient and that food moves through your digestion slower, which means that it's just kind of sitting there and it's creating inflammation and bloating, and it's going to feel very uncomfortable and it's going to probably make you feel like you've gained weight.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: That is a prime example of your body reacting to the food that you give it.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't trust that it's getting fed enough.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't trust when it's gonna get fed.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so it adapts by slowing down certain systems that actually make it less efficient whenever you do give it more food.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you don't have this trust developed in your body, that is when it feels like your body is reacting to absolutely everything that you do.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that is just one example of a system in your body that gets less efficient whenever you try to do the whole eat less, move more, and it doesn't actually work.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think about everything else that's going on in your body with maybe your sleep, with your energy, with your gut, with your hormones, with all of these things in your body, then it makes sense as to why your body isn't responding the way you want it to.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: This is where your approach to fitness has to be so much deeper than just calories and just about burning calories.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's more so about your metabolism, making sure that you're nourishing your body with enough food, with the right foods, and actually making sure that your intention with going to the gym is to build muscle so that muscle increases your metabolism and helps your body to burn calories for you without you having to burn yourself to the ground just to burn calories.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: When you can add more tissue to your body, that makes your body more effective.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: That and the fact that muscle makes your body more resilient to food because it helps to absorb nutrients, taking them out of your bloodstream and absorb them into cells so that the food is able to be utilized the way that it should be instead of being stored when your body is under stress.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So your intention should be to build muscle to make your body more efficient, to help your body burn more calories at rest, to help your body handle food a lot better, but then also on the flip on the food side of things to make sure that you are nourishing your body with enough food, making sure that you're getting enough of what you need, making sure you're eating good whole foods, making sure that you're eating the right macros, making sure that you're eating enough fiber, making sure that you're actually nourishing your body the way that it needs to be nourished, so that your body can function the way that your body was supposed to, so that it can actually respond to the effort that you are pouring in so that you don't feel like you are pouring in a shit ton of effort to get no results from it, because nobody wants to work their ass off and not actually see benefits from that.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: So I know this was a short episode and I had to pump that out super, super fast, but I hope all of that made sense that it is not just about eating less and moving more.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's about making sure that your body is actually being met where it needs to be met so that it can be as efficient as possible so that you can get the most out of what you are doing.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that is it for today's episode.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I hope that you enjoyed and I will chat with you in the next episode.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: Bye.