The Simplicity of Wellness Podcast
The Simplicity of Wellness podcast is about learning how to bring your body into balance so that you get leaner, stronger and healthier as you age. Each week I'll share thoughts and ideas that help my clients build the self-awareness, self-confidence and self-reliance to lose weight, shed inches, manage muscle mass and master their mind so that they can stop dieting and enjoy living at their healthy weight with optimal wellness.
The Simplicity of Wellness Podcast
Adapting Your Diet: When High Energy Foods Make Sense
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Unlock the secrets of the "body dial" and how it can revolutionize the way you approach your diet and physical activity. Join me, Amy White, as I recount my exhilarating Grand Canyon hiking adventure and how it taught me to adapt my diet for intense physical demands. We navigate the concept of aligning dietary intake with your activity levels, helping you categorize foods by consumption frequency to maintain a balanced lifestyle. Discover why proteins and vegetables are your best friends during sedentary times, but carbs and fats take the spotlight when your energy expenditure soars. Listen in as I break down my hiking nutrition strategy, offering insights into customizing your eating habits to match your physical exertion.
Gear up for the holiday season with the "Holiday Health Odyssey" masterclass on October 25th, where we'll tackle the challenges of festive indulgence while keeping health and wellness in focus. This free session is designed to arm you with strategies to balance macros and protein effectively, ensuring you can enjoy the holidays without derailing your health goals. We’ll share valuable practices for balancing blood sugar, curbing cravings, and bolstering your energy levels, alongside setting realistic protein goals to aid in weight loss without feeling hungry. Plus, we'll explore how to indulge guilt-free, providing a roadmap to become leaner and healthier without drastic lifestyle upheavals. Register now to step into the new year feeling your absolute best.
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Welcome to the Simplicity of Wellness podcast. I'm your host, board-certified holistic nutritionist and professional life coach, amy White. The purpose of this podcast is to share information that you can use to become leaner, stronger and healthier by losing weight, shedding inches, maintaining muscle and managing your mind, all while living your normal busy life in this modern, sugar-filled world.
Speaker 2:Hello, Simplifiers. If you listened to last week's podcast or if you follow me on Instagram, you're probably aware that my husband and I did a big Grand Canyon hike last week. We hiked down the south rim of the Grand Canyon, camped overnight in the bottom of the canyon and then hiked up to the north rim the following day. This was a strenuous, long hike. We thought day one going down was going to be pretty easy, but it turned out to be super steep and very hot Unseasonably hot, in fact. We climbed seven miles down and descended 4,800 feet over those seven miles. I believe the total hike to our campground was eight miles and it took us five and a half hours without any real breaks. We knew the hike up was going to be hard, because 15 miles is hard no matter where you're walking, and we were also carrying weight, so uphill for 15 miles with the extra 20 pounds of my backpack. The hardest part about going up was the documented mileage was off. There's nothing worse than expecting a rest stop at a certain point and then finding out it's further than expected.
Speaker 2:The reason I'm giving you all of this backstory is because today I want to talk about your body dial. This is a concept that I teach all of my clients. The simple way I explain this is think of your body as having three settings fat gain or excess energy mode, maintenance or hold steady mode, and then fat burn or what I call high protein mode For anyone who has a weight loss or really a fat loss goal. You want your body dial set to fat burn mode until you reach your goal and then you want to reset that dial to maintenance. If you have a weight loss goal, the fat gain or excess energy mode may not make sense. Why would anybody want to be in excess energy mode? It's important to remember every body is different and we all live our lives in different ways with different goals. The excess energy mode is when the body is taking in a lot of calories. I refer to this as fat gain mode because my clients are people who will typically gain fat and weight if their diet is causing them to eat a lot of excess calories. My clients are generally sedentary people. A sedentary lifestyle doesn't require an excessive amount of calories. Now, if you're thinking well, I'm not sedentary, you might be right, but let's dig into this idea just a little bit more.
Speaker 2:I personally exercise three to four days a week with weights. I try to hit eight to 10,000 steps a day, but I don't always get there. I also consider myself a mostly sedentary person. My exercise happens during a single 40 to 60 minute block of time. My steps can and do build up over the day, but again, most of my day is sitting at my desk. I have to really focus to get eight to 10,000 steps on a regular day. So even if you exercise, if you spend seven hours or more of your awake time sitting or laying down, you are considered sedentary. Unfortunately, a busy day will have me at my desk for five to six hours. As you can imagine, it's not hard to get that extra hour or two of sedentary time in the evenings after dinner, while you're kind of hanging around waiting to go to bed. So for me, eating excess energy-rich calories in the form of fats and carbs while living my everyday, mostly sedentary life will make it difficult for me to maintain my happy weight. But what about those people who are not sedentary? Professional athletes, for example, who expend tons of energy all day long, or even regular people who enjoy endurance sports, 100 mile runs or bike rides, training for triathlons and marathons? These people will feel more comfortable with their body dial set more in that excess energy zone. They need these calories to support their activity.
Speaker 2:Most of the time my life is mostly sedentary. Last week my life was not Last week, during our time hiking in the Grand Canyon. We ate very differently than we do on a normal day. We ate mostly high energy food and it made a difference. It really helped us get up and out of the canyon last Friday. I'll give you a detailed explanation of the food we ate versus what we normally eat in a minute. But first the reason I'm telling you this is to give an example of lifestyle and or environment change and how that can shift how you choose to eat.
Speaker 2:A healthy diet is a diet that supports your lifestyle. I think of a healthy diet as one that breaks food into three categories what you eat most of the time, what you eat some of the time and those foods you eat rarely or never by choice. In my normal sedentary life, my most of the time food is a lot of protein, vegetables and some fruit with some healthy fat like butter, olive oil, olives and avocado. When my life shifts to mostly active with an endurance component, like our hike last week, my food shifts to more of my sometimes and rarely foods, foods that are high calorie, carbs and fats. I tracked my food from last Friday, the day we did our 15 mile climb out of the canyon. That climb took us about 10 hours. I ate about 3000 calories that day. Those calories came from one cup of maple, brown sugar, gluten-free oatmeal that I started my day with.
Speaker 2:Homemade snack packs of mixed nuts and dried fruit, homemade peanut butter and honey, sandwiches on gluten-free bread, homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on gluten-free bread, mini packets of peanut M&Ms, beef sticks and beef jerky. So here's how my macros broke down for Friday's trail food 96 grams of protein, 152 grams of fat, 316 total carbs. Again, that added up to about 3,000 calories. 13.3% of those 3,000 calories came from protein, 46% came from fat and 41% of my calories came from carbs. This is how a typical American diet tends to break down. Most people tend to eat 13-14% of calories from protein, which is why most people are overweight. They live a sedentary life in the fat gain food zone. I would be very overweight if I ate like this even half the time.
Speaker 2:My calories on a typical day at home usually top out at about 1500 calories. So here's what I ate on Sunday. This is a more typical day for me. I had one and a quarter cups of low-fat cottage cheese, which is about 31 grams of protein, with 100 grams of chopped pineapple and a chicken sausage for breakfast. Lunch was five and a half ounces of roasted chicken. Now, normally I have this with salad, but on this particular day I was deboning the chicken for the week and so I basically ate while I was deboning the chicken. But I knew I was tracking my food, so I did weigh the amount of chicken that I ate. So I know it was five and a half ounces. Dinner was an eight ounce pork chop with 190 grams of roasted butternut squash and 150 grams of roasted broccoli with about a teaspoon of olive oil. I sprayed the butternut squash and I sprayed the broccoli with some olive oil spray, so not a ton of olive oil, but there was olive oil. I also had a snack on Sunday, which was another serving of cottage cheese and pineapple. My total calories for the day came out to 1,445, so just shy of 1,500, with 164 grams of protein, 64 grams of fat and 78 grams of total carbohydrates. My calorie percentages were 44% of my calories came from protein, 39% came from fat and 17% came from carbs.
Speaker 2:When people eat in the fat gain zone, they tend to be chronically hungry because they aren't getting the nutrients their body needs. They feel like they hardly eat anything and can't lose weight, and that's because they really don't eat a lot. But their calories add up very quickly. The nut and dried fruit snack packs that we put together were in those little snack-sized bag quickly. The nut and dried fruit snack packs that we put together were in those little snack-sized baggies. The total calories for one of those snack packs was 621. Three of those snack packs which isn't a lot of food at all would have your calories over 1,800.
Speaker 2:For most sedentary people, this will cause weight gain. If you have a weight loss goal, you want your body dial set somewhere within the fat burn zone. You do this by prioritizing protein while limiting excess calories from carbs and fats. If you really want to dial in your protein so that it's working as a weight loss tool, shoot for 40% of your calories coming from protein. Once you hit your goal weight, you can shift your percent of calories from protein down so that you can include a level of carbs and fats that help you maintain your steady, healthy weight. The increase of carbs and fats will be different for everyone. Some people will be more tolerant of carb and fat energy, while others will need to be more selective about what they choose to eat. Most of the time, I'll talk more about the difference of managing protein as a percent of calories versus number of grams in an upcoming podcast.
Speaker 2:If you'd like to learn more about macros and protein so that you can feel really good while losing weight, join me on October 25th at 11 am, pacific time for my free masterclass, the Holiday Health Odyssey. What's a holiday health odyssey? It's you knowing how to enjoy the holidays so that you wake up on January 1st feeling better, looking better and being healthier than you are today, so that you have the body, comfort and confidence to say yes when opportunity knocks. In this live interactive masterclass, we'll be covering the best diet practices for blood sugar balance, to control cravings and boost energy. Ideal protein goals for weight loss without hunger, managing macros so food feels easy, enjoying indulgences without weight gain or self-judgment. Click the registration link below the show notes and then mark your calendar so you don't miss the live masterclass.
Speaker 2:All right, have a great week. I will be back in the next episode. Do you like the idea of eating for the body you want? Is there a piece of you that's eager to learn how to become leaner, stronger and healthier without having to overhaul your entire life? If this is you, then you're in luck, because this is what I do. I can help you reconnect and work with your body so that you can enjoy the body, comfort and confidence you deserve, eating foods you love. Click the free consult link in the show notes. Let's talk about where you are, what you want and how you can get there.
