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Today’s solo episode tackles one of the most commonly asked questions I get, and that’s how I healed my metabolism. This was one thing that took me a really long time to figure out, and I’m very much still on the journey. I hope to, with every decade as I get older, become stronger and move toward better health. I learned a lot by doing things the wrong way for a very long time, and so I want to share some of those things I learned and the things I got wrong for a long time before I got them right.
I’m going deep into the topic of how I healed my metabolism, essentially despite my best efforts for a very long time, and eventually finally figured out how to gain muscle and lose fat. I share the things that worked for me, from shifting my mindset, getting morning sunlight, dialing in my sleep, eating the most nutrient-dense foods I could, and more. I know this won’t work for everyone, but I wanted to share what worked for me after years of trial and error.
I hope you enjoy this episode!
Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
This episode is brought to you by Alitura Skincare. And I have known Andy, who’s the founder of Alitura, for many years now. And I had him on my podcast to share his story of his recovery from a car accident that left him with internal injuries, a broken jaw, and all kinds of skin lacerations. Truly out of desperation to repair his own facial scarring, he began making his own natural skincare products at home, and Alitura was born. Andy knows how important it is not only to use clean ingredients, but to proactively use ingredients that will benefit and support the skin. So every component is pure and made with organic ingredients sourced from the far reaches of the globe with time-honored history. I truly have never seen anyone be as absolutely careful and well-researched and meticulous in their sourcing as Andy is with Alitura. Their handcrafted skincare products are made from ingredients sourced in Hawaii, and bees native into the area accelerate the pollination of flowers, which form the base of many of their unique blends.
And their secret really is in the formulation, which Andy has absolutely dialed in. This is fueled by his personal passion to meticulously source the time-tested best ancient skincare remedies, and he discovered a fascinating assortment of plant botanicals that are truly medicine for the skin. They package everything in Miron glass, which is a high-quality material sourced from the Netherlands that blocks artificial light to preserve the quality of all of their products. And the special glass is used in place of synthetic ingredient preservatives for top-grade quality. Their products contain zero filler or toxic ingredients that harm your skin, and every ingredient serves a purpose. So what started as a natural healing journey for Andy after facing a life-threatening accident has become a premium quality natural skincare collection that is celebrated by over 100,000 people worldwide, including me. I absolutely love their gold serum if you’re going to try anything. And the mask is absolutely amazing. Check out all the products at wellnessmama.com/go/alitura and use the code wellnessmama for a discount. So again, that’s wellnessmama.com/go/alitura. Make sure to use the code wellnessmama for a discount.
This episode is sponsored by Our Place. And this company is awesome. They believe in the power of home cooking to bring people together, which I’m also a huge proponent of. And they have created products that make cooking and sharing a meal together, easier and more joyful and free of all the harmful things I don’t like in my kitchen. They have a wide array of things now. I always find myself using their Always Pan and also their Wonder Oven, which is a toaster oven, an air fryer in one. And I get a lot of requests for an air fryer recommendation, especially one that’s free of things like forever chemicals and nonstick chemicals. And my family has been using their Wonder Oven for a while now. And absolutely, we love it. I love that even my little kids can cook in it really well now. So I will often find them either heating or cooking from scratch their own food in the Wonder Oven. The tray they use in the Wonder Oven is toxin-free, and it’s made without PFAS, PFOAS, PTFEs, lead, cadmium, and other potentially toxic materials. The inside of the air fryer is stainless steel and not coated. And it’s compact enough that it fits easily on the corner of my kitchen countertop for quick use. And it comes in a lot of fun colors.
Their Always Pan has 10 uses so that you can use the one pan to seamlessly saute, fry, bake, roast, sear, boil, braise, strain, and serve. And I try to make several one pan meals a week. And this one is great for that. Especially, I use it often for breakfast stir fries.
Another thing I like about Our Place is they have a 100-day trial with free returns, so they make it even easier to give their cookware a try without the risk. You can check out all of their products by going to wellnessmama.com/go/our-place/ and use the code wellnessmama for a discount. And that link is also in the show notes if it’s easier to click on it there.
Hello and welcome to the Wellness Moment Podcast. Hi, I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and this solo episode tackles one of my most asked questions on social media and in response to emails. And I hope I’ll be able to get deep enough on this question today to answer it in depth and also to give some resources for any of you who are in a similar place of the journey that I was.
I will say at the beginning, this one was one that took me a really long time to figure out and that I’m very much still on the journey of. But in this episode, I’m going to go deep on the topic of how I healed my metabolism, essentially despite my best efforts for a very long time, and eventually finally figured out how to gain muscle and lose fat.
And I am still on that journey. My hope is to, every decade as I get older, to be stronger and move toward even better health. But I learned a lot by doing things the wrong way for a very long time. And so I wanted to share some of those things I inadvertently learned and intentionally learned and the things I got wrong for a long time before I got them right.
Before we jump in, I’d also want to just share so much gratitude with you for being here, for listening, and being part of the community. And as I start doing these solo podcast episodes, I would love especially to hear from you any topics you would especially like me to cover or any questions you have. You can always comment on these podcast posts or DM me on Instagram, and I read those and take those into account.
Again, this is something I got wrong, obviously, if you guys have followed for a long time, for a lot of years before finally getting right. And I did have some excuses along the way, like six pregnancies and like Hashimoto’s, which I no longer have. However, in hindsight, I realize that the same things that I’m going to talk about today actually would have been really helpful, potentially even more helpful because of those factors as well. And I wish I had learned them earlier because figuring out these pieces are what finally made the difference and let the needle move for me.
I’m also just sharing what works for me. This is by no means prescriptive. As always, anything I share is always just informational and informative. Inspirational never for comparison or prescriptive, and if it’s helpful you guys let me know in the comments and give me feedback, I’m also working on sort of an elaborate, really detailed version of this like a 21 day version for anyone who is in an intensive healing place like I was of all the things I wish I had had in one place from back then. So if you would be interested in that, let me know I’m working on the final touches of that in the next few weeks.
Now, before we jump in, as often is the case, a lot of what I’m going to talk about in some ways goes against conventional wisdom, and in a lot of ways I feel like is now also being talked about quite a lot in the mainstream. I’m really going to dive deep on the topics of things like optimizing metabolism, balancing hormones, and losing weight sustainably.
I think this is an area where it is important to note that women are not just small men and there are some extra considerations. I know for me, one of the hard parts for me to learn and I’ll detail what I learned and what worked a little bit later in this episode was that I needed to figure out how to do things like release body fat without stressing out my hormones. That if I tipped into stressing out my hormones, my body and its wisdom went into protective mode and tended to want to hold on to weight. And again, this is controversial because a lot of the conventional wisdom is strictly calories in, calories out, there are a lot of opinions on that. I’m certainly not here to debate that. I’m just going to share what worked for me when certainly calories in, calories out did not.
I will say candidly that for many, many years while I’m pregnant and nursing and with thyroid issues and exhausted, there were many, many days when I only ate about 800 calories. So the math of that certainly does not make sense if it were truly just calories in, calories out.
In hindsight, I’m grateful for that experience, because I would never have gotten to dive into all of these topics I’m going to talk about had I not had that very frustrating, decade long experience of not being able to lose weight.
I’ll also say that even as I started figuring these pieces out and learning them, even implementing them, I had a lot of false starts because I didn’t trust that they were going to work. I was terrified that if I, for instance, ate more food and really focused on nourishing my body, that I would just gain more weight. And it took a while, it took some reinforcement and some friendship with my body and actually listening to my body to realize that wasn’t the case. And I will admit I still have days where sometimes this is hard for me. And it would be so easy to just not eat enough or to not give my body the nutrients it needs.
I also got to experience this in a kind of acute way when I did my yearly water fast this year, which I did this year for mental and spiritual reasons, and I’m really grateful I did. But understanding my metabolism much better now, I realized that that was going to be a stress on my metabolism and my hormones, and so I made sure to really focus on safety signals with my body ahead of time, maximally nourishing my body before the fast so that, and then staying in a state of as low stress as possible other than the fasting during the fast. And then after reinforcing those safety cues with my body, maximally nourishing my body again, making sure I was getting plenty of rest. I was not doing heavy lifts or anything during the fast itself.
And I can tell from tracking my metrics that I did have a little bit of a dip even doing all of that at the end of the fast. And just after, well, my body sort of recovered and caught back up. However, I think I was able to navigate that fast in a pretty healthy way because of this resilience I’ve cultivated over these last few years of trying to heal my metabolism.
I’ll also make sure I link to some resources about this in the show notes if you want to go deeper on this. I learned some of these things from Justin Alt and I’ll link to his podcast episode as well as to his program called Clovis where he really goes deep on this. He’s helped thousands of people heal their metabolism and he’s the one that taught me the core tenets of the things I’m going to talk about today like eating enough protein, making sure you’re getting the right foods to signal your body that you’re not in starvation, that you are getting enough nutrients that your body is safe.
I think that’s one we tend to find kind of advice for extreme diets, or extreme calorie restriction, or extreme carb restriction, or extreme food group restriction, or the extremes tend to get popular on social media because they’re extreme. And I feel like he’s a very balanced voice in choose foods that are actually food, that don’t have something that’s overtly harmful to your body, and eat as much as you need to make sure your metabolism is healthy, to nourish yourself, to make sure you’re getting enough micronutrients and protein to actually build the tissues you need to function optimally. But again, more on that later.
Also, I will say this, the things I learned on this journey are sort of the basis for what I’m kind of calling my nutrient theory of health, and I will be going deeper on this soon, because I think, for me at least, and I think for some other people, this might be the missing piece when it comes to health. I think we overemphasized calories and while I do think those are worth understanding and that they can be important I do also believe that it’s a both-and and that we miss this nutrient piece when we simply talk about calories. And I don’t just mean macronutrients. I think we’re hearing more about micronutrients and I’m very excited that we are because I think they are actually a really important piece that we often overlook.
Also, I said before we go into this, I am not a doctor. I do not play one on the internet. This is not medical advice. I am very much still on this journey as well. And my hope is to get stronger and leaner and healthier every decade as I get older. I will be sharing the journey here with you if, whether that happens, or it doesn’t. And I always love to hear back from you as well. But all that to say, I am a mom walking this journey herself. I’m not a doctor or an expert. I’m just sharing what I’ve learned and what works for me.
So as we jump in, like I said, a lot of this might go against at least the conventional wisdom that, for instance, I learned in nutrition school and that I would guess the little bit of nutrition that doctors get that they learn as well. There’s certainly the kind of prominent belief that losing weight is simply about eating less and moving more, lower the calories in, calories out, and then it’s about simple math. And there’s more to this story, in my opinion if you want to have a healthy functioning metabolism. I think it is a lot more nuanced than simply calories in calories out.
I do believe the type of calories matter. At least it really has made a difference for me. I think as women, what is in those foods we consume, whether we’re getting the right nourishment we need, not just the right calories we need, makes a tremendous difference. And like I said, for me, I actually kind of tested the extreme end of the bell curve where I was eating so low calorie for so long that my body interpreted that as an extremely high stress event, and that was what I eventually had to undo.
Now, one thing I want to point out is, according to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, prolonged calorie restriction, which is what I did for a long time, can cause a decrease in resting metabolic rate, or RMR, which you can actually now do a test for. And I have recently done a test for it and indicated that mine is finally healed. But what this means, if you reduce your RMR, it means your body burns fewer calories at rest.
And this actually makes complete sense because if your body thinks that resources are scarce and that there’s not enough food available, in its wisdom, it will adapt so that you need fewer calories to function. Because if you’re not going to be able to get enough calories and you need to function, it down regulates because it is on your side. But, when we diet and we don’t take that into account, we can essentially send our body the signal that we are in that state when we aren’t, and we can cause it to go lower and lower, our RMR to go lower and lower, so we have to progressively eat fewer and fewer and fewer calories to lose weight. And again, that’s assuming just calories in a vacuum, not even what’s in the calories.
But to me, understanding this was understanding this was understanding that chronically just eating less and less and less is sort of training for the outcome we don’t want. We don’t want to train for an eventual outcome of eating almost no calories and having no energy.
And that was kind of what started to open my eyes to this. Actually, an analogy, I wish I remembered where I heard it, that really changed my mindset about this, was thinking of metabolism instead like a fire. And if you’re building a campfire and you want the fire to get hotter, how do you do that? How do you accomplish that? You accomplish that by adding more fuel, more wood to the fire, not by taking fuel away. And so when I switched from thinking, how do I start myself into removing body fat and instead started thinking, how can I support my metabolism so that it burns more so that it uses and consumes in a healthy way and can effectively make use of more calories while helping me get leaner and stronger. It was a whole different paradigm. And I got much more interesting answers when I started asking better questions.
Now, again, here’s where I feel like for me, at least, and I would guess for other people as well, the nuance really comes in because I think it is both-and when it comes to calories, not that they aren’t important, but that they are only part of the story.
It’s also about minimums of things like protein, which we’re of course hearing a lot about. If you’re on social media at all, everybody’s talking about protein, but I think it’s beyond that. I think it’s also healthy fats and especially micronutrients to signal safety to the body.
Now, my personal theory is that if we’re not getting enough of those things, especially minerals and micronutrients, the body can still feel stressed and cause us to crave things to try to get those nutrients that we need. And so, by an extension of that, I wondered if I made sure to maximally nourish my body and get a wide range of micronutrients and minerals in the amounts my body needed, would it be able to get that signal of safety A, without me having to eat more calories than I needed, but B and help me feel safe, even if I was reducing the amount of food I was eating or gradually working up the amount of food I was eating from the extremely low amount that I started with.
And I think on all sides, this is the part that sometimes we get wrong. I think it comes down to safety. And this is kind of like my nutrient safety theory with when it comes to this, which is if we send the body the message that things are not safe, the body will do exactly what it’s supposed to do and protect us. If we tell it that there’s not enough food, it will figure out how to function on not enough food. If we tell it, there’s not enough nutrients, it’s going to do everything in its power to try to get us to eat enough food to get those nutrients. But if it can’t, it’s going to adapt to function as best possible without those nutrients. So I wanted to learn how to figure out how to navigate letting go of fat while reinforcing to the body that it was safe.
I also realized that I likely also had things stored in my body and fat tissue because the body uses fat tissue to store things. It doesn’t want to impact us in a harmful way that I needed to figure out how to release those things, which also for me came down to minerals and binders and things like zeolite. That’ll be a whole different podcast, but I needed to address that so that I wasn’t simply mobilizing all of those things and putting them back in my body to then have to deal with them.
But, let’s go a little deeper on what is the actual problem with eating too little. So, in my opinion, what goes on with our body is if we eat too little for too long, the body sort of enters what we hear in mainstream called survival mode. I think it’s actually just the body being perfectly adaptable and being always on our side. I’m sure you’ve heard me say this before, if you’ve listened to the podcast, but that was a massive reframe for me. It was shifting from when I had autoimmune disease thinking my body is attacking itself to reframing that my body is always my best friend. It’s always on my side. So if it’s doing something, it’s doing that in my best interest, and getting curious about why that is. Same thing with if the body is constantly being undernourished or underfed, and it adapts, instead of looking at that adaptation as the problem itself, look at that as the body giving you a direct message. What it needs so that we can better listen to it.
So when we under eat for a long time, Justin explains this really, really well and I’ll link to that podcast episode, but our body adapts in a way to protect us from that. So our metabolism slows down so that we need less food to function daily. Our fat storage increases, which makes sense because if resources are scarce, we need to be able to hold on to anything we can so that we can function and hold it till we, like, if there are foods available, hold on to it as much as we possibly can. And then weight loss stalls because that’s not the body’s priority. The body’s trying to really hold on to everything.
And in this sense, I feel like, jokingly, but not jokingly, I have great genes for famine. This is actually, like, funny. Seen in my ancestry, but I’d probably do pretty good in a famine because my body does great when it gets the message that food is scarce at holding on to things and downregulating my energy levels to function as best as possible with almost no calories.
But over time, this can also mess with our hormones, or at least it did for me. And I think especially for women, this can become a risk because when we are in that state, when the body interprets that we are not safe, that we are in a state of famine that causes a cortisol spike when we’re undernourished. This can lead to stress, this can lead to visceral fat accumulation, this can lead to mood swings, low energy, which I certainly had for many years.
There are studies even that show that chronic low calorie consumption increases cortisol levels. There’s been a lot of talk on social media about cortisol lately. I’m going to do an episode on that one soon. I think it’s absolutely fascinating, and I do think it’s important and worth understanding. However, one of those safety signals we can send to our body is proper nourishment at the right times.
I’m also going to talk more about light in a minute, but I think some of the strongest safety cues that we can send to our body are getting the right amount of light at the right time and avoiding artificial light at the wrong time, and also through food. Food and light are massive signaling mechanisms to the body, to our hormones, to our circadian rhythm. And so, I think getting those pieces in place are really, really important.
The great news here is natural light outdoors is free. And if we’re already eating anyway, and we’re just shifting what time we’re eating or the macros of what we’re eating, this step can actually get less expensive when you dial it in and get really healthy.
And I think for women especially, if we can shift that mindset away from deprivation and into maximal nourishment, sending safety signals, and helping the body feel safe, that’s where we can really see the right amount of change. And for me, what was important to dial in here was getting enough protein, enough healthy fats and enough micronutrients to signal to the body that it was safe, that there were abundant nutrients, minerals, micronutrients, etc. That it didn’t need to store fat to try to hold on in case there was a famine.
And, so because of this, over time it was a slow process. I wish this were as fast as I made the decision that I was going to fix my metabolism, implemented these steps, and the next day we were, we were, you know, all systems go. In reality, it was a yearlong process at least of being very gentle with my body. Not doing things that signal stress. So not intense exercises. Nothing high intensity. I was not going for long runs. I was not staying up late at night. I was not looking at blue light after 9 o’clock at night. I was not fasting. I was not doing anything high stress. Instead, I was trying to put as many things as possible in the column of safety signals to my body.
So that was things I’m going to talk about more in a minute, but things like getting enough sleep, really, really paying attention to you and sort of maximizing my light cues and getting that dialed in, and then figuring out what worked best for my body when it came to food cues.
One of the big ones, this is a key takeaway, if you are a woman and you’re trying to support your metabolism and your hormones that made a massive difference for me was simply making it a habit to get about 40 to 45 grams of protein in the morning before coffee to really signal safety to my metabolism.
And bonus points, I love to eat outside whenever possible, but this one shift alone made a huge difference in my energy levels and also my cravings later in the day, which made it easier to stick to really nourishing foods over craving things later on in the day.
So I would just simply, my morning routine became, I would get up, I would drink mineral water that was on my nightstand. I would go make breakfast and I would eat it outside in the sunlight. Even if it was cloudy, I ate it outside before I made coffee. Not that I have a problem with coffee. I love coffee, but I just shifted that to after protein because coffee is amazing as it is. It can stress us out a little bit. It can, it affects our adenosine and it affects our cortisol. So getting the protein and hydration first helps the body feel a lot safer, even if you’re still going to drink coffee, which I am.
Okay, so let’s go a little bit more on that note into the specifics of eating enough the right way. For me, I had to actually learn and pay attention to and track, not to eat less, but I had to track to learn to eat more. And in a few key categories. So I had to learn to eat more protein, I had to learn to eat more healthy fats, and then micronutrients and minerals were a big category for me. Those will each get their own podcast, but one hack here was I started paying attention to of all the foods I’m going to eat in a day, which I knew I could only eat a certain amount, how can I make sure that those are maximally nourishing, that have the most nutrients possible?
So that led me to eat a lot of things like seafood, meat, brightly colored fruits and vegetables, fermented fruits and vegetables, like fermented dairy, raw dairy, pastured egg yolks. Like I was really looking for the most nutrient dense foods available to signal to my body nutrients are abundant, we don’t need to store fat, we’re going to get everything we need from food.
This was kind of my putting fuel on the fire analogy there. Like, how can I most nourish myself? And I will say from that, I noticed a big difference relatively quickly, even in my skin, my hair started growing faster. I had better energy. So this was like prioritizing just the most high-quality things I could find and afford in my daily diet and then also supplementing where possible.
I do think supplementation could be really helpful because our food supply has declined. But I was also trying to really source things locally and get as nutrient dense foods as I could to begin with and then supplement with those minerals and micronutrients that helped just kind of like be in a little insurance policy. I’ll link to some of the things I used in the show notes if you’re interested. I don’t think it’s the same for everybody but I’ll link to what worked for me.
I think the really big piece here, and the takeaway that made a huge difference, much more than the practical of what I actually ate, was the mindset shift away from restriction and toward maximally nourishing my body and finding joy and pleasure in eating. I can say that from a year, from 10 years of chronic dieting, that was not fun. That was not joyful. That was not pleasurable. I did not love it. If anything, I was actually always thinking about food because I was restricting it. Or I was from thyroid issues, so tired I wasn’t thinking about food at all.
But when I shifted that, and I was trying to maximally nourish my body and find the most like, pleasurable ways to do that, I started really, really enjoying the taste and the textures of different foods and getting to make those and the experience of nourishing my body. I feel like I became friends with my body and also through that got more in touch and intuitive with what my body needed.
And so as I went through that process, I would find days where I really wanted cilantro and I would make cilantro pesto or I really craved anchovy. So I would make a Caesar dressing and put it on salmon or whatever the case would be. I just feel like I opened the line of communication with my body that became really powerful and helpful.
And I’d also don’t want to make it sound like I always get this right. I still have days where I forget to eat enough, and I feel that stress in my body. I still actively have to pay attention to this because of all those years of undereating but I’m slowly learning to, for it to be more of a lifestyle and a habit and that joy and that pleasure in it has helped kind of cement that habit for me.
I’ve talked about it a lot so I’m not gonna hammer it too much here, but I’ll put some links in the show notes because there are so many studies really also pointing to that consuming enough dietary protein. I also take Kion on aminos as an insurance policy here, and I do sometimes do animal based protein powders, but that consuming enough protein on a daily basis really helps with satiety and muscle mass retention, which is something I’m very focused on as I get older.
Actually, I’ve been plan to get more muscle every decade as I get older, which for now the bar is pretty low because I had babies my entire 20s and wasn’t focused on lifting, but protein is a big key here as well.
So now I’ll get a little bit more into the specifics of my personal approach to this. Strictly just what I did and what worked for me. I don’t think this will work cookie cutter for everybody else, but there might be something you can pull and experiment with in your own life that you might find helpful.
One piece I have not mentioned yet, is that quality sleep is vital for this. The importance of quality sleep, especially for that signaling of safety to the body and the nervous system, of letting the body release fat, of gaining muscle, I do not feel like sleep is optional. It’s not an optional step, and it wasn’t possible for me when I was pregnant in nursing. So I know that there’s a situational element to this, but getting enough sleep is a game changer for metabolism and for regulation of things, like hunger hormones like ghrelin and leptin.
I’m also going to do a whole podcast on leptin at some point. I’m glad we’re hearing more about this one. But we all know that sleep is important. If anything, we feel guilty when we don’t get enough sleep. But even a few nights of poor sleep can make it almost impossible for the body to release that because it simply is prioritizing other things because it’s not getting enough sleep and it’s not getting enough restorative time during sleep to be able to shift into a fat burning mode and in order for your liver to work effectively for that.
So to me, if in any, whenever possible, sleep is an absolute non-negotiable. I try to get seven to nine hours a night. I tend to get the best sleep scores when I get between eight and a half to nine hours a night.
A few random things that seemingly help my sleep were things like adding Masszymes with my meals and right before bed. I think that helps clear out anything that’s like built up in the body and also helps with digestion so that we’re not digesting while we’re sleeping. That’s also been good for my skin. I take that occasionally. I take pectasol occasionally, which you can hear about that one in the podcast I did with Dr. Isaac Eliaz. He wrote a book called The Survival Paradox, and he was working with cancer patients, but because pectasol helps target something called galactin 3, which is an inflammatory protein, I experimented with it to help just reduce inflammation in my body and help my body more effectively deal with inflammation.
Magnesium and inositol were both also helpful for me in sleep. And then I often make like a really high nutrient bedtime drink that is very low calorie, doesn’t have any sugar or anything but it has cacao and it has some adaptogenic herbs and some reishi. And that helps as well.
Also, when I have done talked about a lot in the past, I will also do an episode on this in the future, but, morning sunlight helps really helps our circadian rhythm. So this was a key step for me when it came to the sleep piece. But this also helps with boosting energy levels. It’s really good for supporting our sleep. And even just 10 minutes helps so much, which is why I like to eat breakfast whenever possible outside in the sunshine, even if it’s a cloudy day.
I already mentioned, but just to reiterate, getting enough protein in the morning. So, 35 to 45 grams of protein, ideally within an hour after waking up, ideally eating it outside, and ideally before caffeine. I do hydrate before that meal, but I don’t drink caffeine until after.
I could not eat eggs for a long time. I can now. But before, when I couldn’t, I would focus on things like seafood or steak. I now eat eggs with those things. And then this is often when I will also supplement Kion Aminos or protein powders if needed.
Now I am on hydration. I mentioned hydration first. I view any time I hydrate as an opportunity to also get minerals. So, for the sake of metabolism, our metabolism runs on minerals, or at least I think that. And so if I’m drinking water, I’m often adding something to it. It’s either usually for me, lemon juice or plain salt or Beam Minerals or Ocean Minerals from Activation. There is a study that proper hydration can boost metabolism by up to 30 percent and also many of us are chronically mildly dehydrated. So this alone just simply not just drinking water, again, there’s always more to the story, but drinking enough water plus minerals to actively really hydrate can make a drastic difference.
The other piece I feel like doesn’t get talked about enough, but I touched on a little bit is the benefits of protein, healthy fats, and micronutrients especially. So healthy fats support hormones. There’s been a lot of talk of this, and I think we need to continue that conversation of we do actually need healthy fats from healthy sources to create our hormones, especially our sex hormones. And a lot of us are not getting enough.
In my opinion, vegetable oils do not count. They are not giving us the healthy fats we need. So this would be, in my opinion, fats from animal sources and things like olive oil and avocado oil. I also think we need some key things like vitamin D, which I recommend and personally get from the sun, like magnesium and like micronutrients. For me, this is where this comes in of when I’m making food choices, not just choosing the low calorie option, but choosing the maximally nourishing, most nutrient dense option, and then filling in the gaps with supplements when needed. But that’s not my first line approach.
I will do, like I said, a whole nother podcast on my micronutrient safety approach to this and what worked for me because I think that this actually gave me a lot of leeway when I was learning this, when I made sure I was getting enough minerals and micronutrients and just basic healthy fats and proteins, I was able to get away with probably still undereating for a long time because my body felt a lot safer.
And then the last step that I don’t feel like is the most important step is the movement piece. But I do think this is really, really helpful once you get those other pieces dialed in, at least for me. In the beginning for me, any kind of formal like exercise, lifting, high intensity was too stressful on my body. So I stuck to very light movement like walking, sometimes swimming, that was it. I now can handle much more intense workouts and I feel great doing them. But I’m careful to listen to my body to make sure it’s feeling safe, and I don’t just push it to hit numbers of training. So for that like almost a year, I just did really gentle things like walking I eventually added a weighted vest long before it was popular. I love that those are getting popular now.
Another benefit here is if you’re walking, if possible, do it outside. Anytime I can step on the soapbox of the benefits of outdoor time and natural light, I will. I think that is absolutely huge and that so much can be helped simply by spending more time outside in nature. And I’ll do a solo episode on that as well.
The good news is we don’t need, especially as women, we do not need, nor do we benefit from hours of intense exercise, but humans are designed for consistent movement, for consistent time in nature, and for consistent nourishment. So if you can get those pillars dialed in, that’s what really worked for me.
And I started thinking of all of these things in baby steps. And instead of trying to get them all perfect all the time, I would do little mini bits of them, little walks after meals, instead of trying to walk four miles at a time. Or just simply, now I’ll do push-ups or air squats after meals. Instead of having to make it to the gym, I also go to the gym, but working in those little, tiny bits, or working in little bits of micronutrients. Adding some minerals to my water, getting little bits of sunlight whenever possible, taking a break in between podcasts to just go stand in the sunshine. Those little habits can make a massive difference, especially when it comes to supporting our hormones and our metabolism. Also as a note, sunlight exposure increases serotonin levels and of course we know vitamin D production, both of which are good for our mood and important for weight loss.
So, in conclusion, the things that helped me the most were eating more, not less. I will note that I eat more than double what I used to eat, and I still feel like there’s actually a lot of room for my metabolism to heal even more and to actually increase the amount I’m eating, but I’m doing that by listening to my body. I feel like for women, we often really need that advice to nourish ourselves more, not restrict ourselves more. And that was a hard message for me to hear and it took years to actually internalize and get right. So I hope that by sharing my story, other people might be willing to experiment and have a shorter journey of that than I did, because I feel like it’s not about losing weight. Even the psychology of that, I wish we could let go of, because we’re designed not to want to lose anything.
So when we, when we speak of losing weight, we’re kind of going against our psychology to begin with. But instead, what if we made the conversation about healing our metabolisms and supporting our hormones and maximally nourishing ourselves so that our bodies wanted to move to the state of amount of fat that we want to them to have, not because we’re forcing it, but because that’s what is ideal and what’s comfortable for our bodies and because we’re working in alignment with our bodies.
I think it’s an important reminder to know that like our bodies are always on our side. So if we aren’t getting the results we want, perhaps it’s time to ask different or better questions. And then, that encouragement does shift your mindset. I think nothing for me shifted until my mindset shifted. And that was the shift away from restriction and toward nourishment, toward getting enough sleep, toward hydrating the right way, and to being outside in the sunlight as much as possible.
So if any of that resonates with you, if you have been on any parts of that journey, if you want more detail, let me know for one. I will be curious if you have or do any of this experimentation, what works for you. If you’ll, if you end up eating more, if you make the small mindset shift just toward maximally nourishing yourself and ask me the question, how can I nourish myself more every time you eat? Or how can I become my body’s friend a little bit more? Or how can I find just a little bit more joy and pleasure in nourishing my body today? And I will be so excited to hear what that journey is like for you.
As always if you have questions or want any particular follow ups, please leave a comment or DM me directly I love to hear from you and I will go deeper on any topics you request in future solo podcast episodes. But for today, thank you so, so much for sharing your time today I do believe our most valuable resources are our time and our energy and our attention and especially as moms I don’t take it lightly that you share those with me. Thank you for being here. Thank you for listening.
And if you would also like to stay in touch, please make sure to sign up for my email list at wellnessmama.com where I weekly send a little Wellness Wednesday that has some things that I found inspiring that week or tips that have been helpful to me, books I’m reading, or whatever kind of strikes my fancy that week.
Thank you for listening. I hope you will join me again on the next episode.
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This episode is sponsored by Our Place. And this company is awesome. They believe in the power of home cooking to bring people together, which I’m also a huge proponent of. And they have created products that make cooking and sharing a meal together, easier and more joyful and free of all the harmful things I don’t like in my kitchen. They have a wide array of things now. I always find myself using their Always Pan and also their Wonder Oven, which is a toaster oven, an air fryer in one. And I get a lot of requests for an air fryer recommendation, especially one that’s free of things like forever chemicals and nonstick chemicals. And my family has been using their Wonder Oven for a while now. And absolutely, we love it. I love that even my little kids can cook in it really well now. So I will often find them either heating or cooking from scratch their own food in the Wonder Oven. The tray they use in the Wonder Oven is toxin-free, and it’s made without PFAS, PFOAS, PTFEs, lead, cadmium, and other potentially toxic materials. The inside of the air fryer is stainless steel and not coated. And it’s compact enough that it fits easily on the corner of my kitchen countertop for quick use. And it comes in a lot of fun colors.
Their Always Pan has 10 uses so that you can use the one pan to seamlessly saute, fry, bake, roast, sear, boil, braise, strain, and serve. And I try to make several one pan meals a week. And this one is great for that. Especially, I use it often for breakfast stir fries.
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Katie Wells, CTNC, MCHC, Founder of Wellness Mama and Co-founder of Wellnesse, has a background in research, journalism, and nutrition. As a mom of six, she turned to research and took health into her own hands to find answers to her health problems. WellnessMama.com is the culmination of her thousands of hours of research and all posts are medically reviewed and verified by the Wellness Mama research team. Katie is also the author of the bestselling books The Wellness Mama Cookbook and The Wellness Mama 5-Step Lifestyle Detox.
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