In today’s episode, we are talking all about the biggest myths that slow your metabolism. Why this happens and what you can do instead to really heal your metabolism and mindset around weight loss. 

Hello, beautiful Peaches. Welcome to the Macros Metabolism and Motivation Beautiful Peach podcast. I’m your host, Caitlen, here to help you find your most unwavering love, beauty and kindness for yourself, inside and out. I will be teaching you nutrition and macro tracking secrets, reverse diet and metabolism, health tips and tricks, and motivating the heck out of you so you’ll want to leap up and start conquering your goals right away. I am here to help bring you the light at the end of the tunnel so you can discover that self-love and truly become the most confident, beautiful peach possible.

Now, in today’s episode, I’m going to be talking about two of the top weight loss myths that actually might be slowing your metabolism and causing you to gain weight. These myths are something that I hear truly every single day, and I want to make sure that if you have done these, we are getting you out of that space. And if you are contemplating on doing them, we don’t go down that path. We do not want a slow metabolism. We want a happy, healthy, thriving metabolism.

The Many Myths of Weight Loss

So, the first myth I want to talk about is keto. We know that keto is low carb, but did you know that going low carb might actually be slowing down your metabolism? Carbs do not equal fat gain. Carbs do not equal weight gain. What happens when we eat carbs is it actually gives us energy for our day-to-day. When we eat carbs, it’s either used immediately for the energy or it’s stored as something called glycogen, not to get too nerdy and sciency here, something called glycogen to be used later on.

Now, to do a little bit of a quick background here, all food is made up of protein, carbs, and fats. These are called our macronutrients macros for short. So if you’ve ever heard of the term tracking macros, one of my favorite things to do because it is the fastest way to get to where we want to get to a thriving metabolism, to get that fat loss going for food freedom. It is the best in the entire world. But tracking macros means so we’ve got our protein, our carbs, and our fat. These three make up macronutrients macros, shortened term for macronutrients. Tracking macros means tracking our protein, our carbs, and our fat.

So we’ve got a little bit of background here. Now, carbs have walked you through. It gives us that energy. We can either use it right away or store it as glycogen to use down the road. Protein is amazing, amazing, amazing for muscle growth and recovery. Most people think, oh my gosh, we have to eat all of the protein. You know, skimp out on those carbs. We don’t need that fat, just the protein. However, you actually can overeat protein as well. And I will walk you through that in just a second here. So protein, muscle growth and recovery. And last but not least, fat. Fat does not equal fat, right? The fat on our body does not equal what happens when we consume fat. Fat is an amazing, amazing, amazing secondary source of energy and also necessary for our hormonal balance. So a lot of times, I’ll have clients who come to me or women who come to me eating very low fat, and it’s actually starting to impact so many different systems in our body.

And so as we start to heal their metabolism, go through that reverse diet phase, right of healing our metabolism, reverse dieting is the process. Science is called metabolic adaptation, where we’re going from that lower calorie intake to a higher calorie intake without all of that mass weight regain. Now, we obviously, you know, I’ve talked through they each have their own functions there and we need all three of those in a certain amount. And this is why the very first step that I do with any client is making sure we have that solid foundation of protein, of carbs, and our fat to have that solid foundation to grow from.

Now, this is why when people go to keto, and you don’t have the overall education of the reason why we need protein, carbs, and fat, which is why I like to teach my clients all the nerdy goodness, we don’t know. We’re just kind of leaning in blindly to something we don’t know the what, the why, and the how. So I want to walk you through the background of why and how weight gain happens. So one true pound of weight that comes onto our body is equal to 3500 extra calories. I did the math on these. One true pound of weight gain equals 3500 extra calories. That is 12 slices of pizza. That is 1029 M&Ms, and that is 27 standard chocolate chip cookies. That’s kind of a lot to eat. I mean, eating 27 pieces of pizza in one sitting, that’s impressive. That’s over 1000 M&Ms. I mean, challenge accepted, right? Yeah, I could do it. But that’s the thing. It’s going to take a lot more to actually gain that £1. And also, if you’re tracking your macros and you’re consistent with your macros, and you have a day or a couple of weeks where you’re a little bit off track, you’re not.

And you know what? I shouldn’t say off track. I really don’t like that term off track. I don’t believe you can ever actually be off track when you are tracking your macros, when you are healing your metabolism, and you’re actually consistent with it because your body will adapt and understand what we’re doing. So I had a client in BPM actually. She went on her honeymoon and two weeks honeymoon, no tracking macros, absolutely thriving. Came back, but because she was so consistent with her macros and with her reverse diet prior to, she came back. She had a little bit of a weight fluctuation, probably just water weight. Within a week of being back in her regular routine, back in her macros, everything is back to normal. And that right there is the beauty. And she’s also eating a very large amount of carbs. I think we have her up to around 300 carbs or so. So she’s like rocking with life.

But that’s the big piece to remember is weight comes from overconsumption where our metabolic set point is. So if we’re eating 1200 calories, regardless of whether we’re in that deficit by cutting out carbs, whether we’re in that deficit by cutting out protein, whether we’re in that deficit by cutting out fat, we’re in this deficit. Our metabolism is sitting at this 1200 calorie point. If you eat more than that point, that’s when the weight regain happens. That’s why anybody who ever diets, whenever you or anybody who ever goes into a calorie deficit, after that calorie deficit, you need a reverse diet to heal your metabolism, to avoid all of that weight regain happening.

Now, here’s the big piece. We have that weight regain when we’re eating over that metabolic set point. You go into a low carb space, carbs have calories in them. You’re going into an overall calorie deficit. Could be the same for protein. You’re taking that protein. You’re saying, Hey, I’m going to stop eating protein. Protein has calories. You’re now in a calorie deficit, but you’re just not eating protein. Same for fat, which is why we like to track our macros and have a very perfect amount of our protein and our carbs and our fat. There is a golden number for each of those, and when you have those all in alignment, your body will thrive. Your metabolism will thrive. You can go into that reverse diet and adjust macros to absolutely get you into a space where your metabolism is having a party. It feels so good. And also, you’re seeing amazing muscle growth happen. You’re having that amazing, amazing, amazing weight loss, and you’re just feeling so good.

So when you gain that weight after stopping keto, it is not because you started eating carbs again. It is because your metabolism has been slowed. So when we are in that space, we’re like, Oh my gosh, carbs are the worst. They’re not though. They’re really, really not. It’s just that your metabolism needs some love, so we get to give it some love.

Now, my second favorite myth is that eating after dark causes fat gain, causes weight gain. Like when you think about that. So what happens when the sun goes down? Like a switch just goes on in our body and it’s like, all right, that cookie straight to storing on our fat and our body. All right. You just ate some chicken light switches off. It’s dark outside. That’s not the way that our body works, right? That’s just not the way that it works. So essentially, the science behind this is there’s no alarm system in our body that, you know, it gets dark outside and it’s like, all right, switch off. Now, that’s not a real thing.

I actually encourage my clients to eat a meal before bed because it’s actually going to help with that muscle growth and recovery. So when I walked you through the protein, the carbs, and the fat protein, amazing for muscle growth and recovery, carbs, energy balance. We want to make sure we’re getting carbs into our body, fat for hormonal balance and secondary source of energy. Now, when we are resting, this is actually when the max muscle growth and recovery is happening. So this is why I also encourage having rest days. Yes, you can overtrain. I actually do not encourage you to work out seven days a week. Every single one of my clients, with the exception of a few of them, I have been doing this for a long, long time. But with the exception of a few of them, almost all of them have minimal rest days. I personally work out three to four days a week. I used to work out seven days a week. And when I actually bumped it down, I started seeing more results because we were giving our body that muscle growth and recovery time.

Sleep and Metabolism 

Now, when we are sleeping, this is like the absolute peak. This is when we were having the most muscle growth and recovery. Why? Because our body’s at rest in bed, hanging out. However, if we don’t give our body fuel before we go to bed, what’s going to happen is we’re actually going to be going to bed and going into this muscle growth and recovery phase without any fuel. When we are asleep, we need that protein for muscle growth and recovery. We need those carbs to be fueling our body, and we need that fat for hormonal balance. So I actually encourage my clients to have a meal before bed, and it doesn’t need to be anything super, super filling.

If you see if you follow me on Instagram, I’m posting food all the time, or I have little story highlights of my food and my little nighttime snacks. But it will be absolutely amazing because it’s going to enhance that muscle growth and recovery, and there’s no light switch that’s just like switch off. It’s dark outside. Okay, now that’s going to be stored as fat. That’s not the way it works. And again, if we are tracking our protein, our carbs, and our fat, being our macros, we know that we’re fueling our body with the right amount of food. And that’s one of my favorite things about macros as well, and especially when it comes to reverse dieting. I love to have the confidence and clarity of knowing what I’m doing is what needs to be done, which is probably also why I’m the biggest nerd in the world and why I went to school for these things to nerd out.

But when we know what we’re doing is what our body needs, and it’s backed by science, it’s backed by what truly is happening to our body and our metabolism, It is one of the most freeing feelings in the world because you don’t have to go to Google all the time. You don’t have to sit there and feel lost 24 over seven on social media with 10 million things being said. You say, Hey, no, this is what my body needs. Hey, no, this is actually the way that my body works, and you can move forward from there.

So my big takeaways for you is carbs are not the devil. Okay, fat also. Okay, protein. Everybody hypes protein up, and absolutely, yes, we should hype protein up. We should also hype up carbs and fat as well. So track your macros, have the appropriate macros, and if you’re in a space where you do have a slower metabolism and you’re like, Hey, I’m eating not enough calories. I’m not seeing these changes happen. Talk about this in a couple of my other episodes, but you’ll want to heal your metabolism from that diet burnout from that low-calorie.

Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the Macros Metabolism and Motivation. Beautiful Peach podcast. I hope you found it helpful, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Times to Check Out:

(2:21) The truth about Carbs

(4:02) Fat starts to impact so many systems in your body

(6:19) Water and how that factors in 

(7:45) Muscle growth and weight loss after keto

(9:15) Why you should not work out 7 days a week

(10:54) Confidence and clarity is key

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