When the Math Isn't Mathing: Why Counting Calories Isn't Helping You Lose Weight

You have done everything right. The tracking, the macros, you've done research, you're walking, the strength training. I mean, you literally have the receipts and your body is not responding. What if I told you the problem isn't exactly what you're eating, it's who you think you are. In today's podcast, I'm going to show you the exact reason smart, high-achieving, beautiful, brilliant women just like you stay stuck, and I'm going to show you the 20-minute tool that finally will get the scale moving in the direction that you want it to go without adding one more thing to your already full plate. All right, let's get into this episode. Girl, if you're tired of losing the same 20 pounds over and over and over again, listen up. For years, I thought something was wrong with me. I kept promising this time would be different, only to find myself stress eating at the kitchen counter after a long stressful day. I thought the problem was my body. I thought the problem was the diet I was on or my lack of discipline. But the truth, the real problem wasn't what I was doing. It was who I was being. When I finally stopped trying to fix my weight and started transforming my identity, Everything changed. No more starting over on Monday. No more food guilt. No more feeling like I was fighting against myself. And now that's exactly what I help my clients do. Welcome to Stop Dieting Forever, the podcast that helps you break free from self-sabotage, rewire your mindset, and reinvent yourself into the healthy, confident woman that you crave to be. I'm your host, Jennifer Dent-Brown, certified life and weight loss coach, and I I'm here to show you how to finally stop dieting forever. You ready? Let's dive in. You may be the woman listening to this episode right now, and you're like, listen, Jennifer, I have tried everything. You are not lazy. You are not undisciplined. In fact, you're the opposite of lazy or undisciplined. You're probably one of the most disciplined people in your office. You track your food, you count your steps. Steps. You make sure you do your strength training. You're counting your reps and you're logging your weights. You have read clinical studies about weight loss. You have DEXA scans, so you know all of your numbers. You know your RMR, you know your BMI, you know your basal metabolic rate. You may have tried a GLP-1. Maybe you've tried keto, you've done intermittent fasting, you've gotten the B12 shots, you've done 1,000 calories a day. You've done it all, and it's not working. Your weight is still the exact same. And here is the most frustrating part. You're doing the math, right? The math is not mathing. You can show me your spreadsheet where you have your calories in versus your calories out. You're tracking your calorie expenditure. You're tracking how many calories you're eating per meal. And you can prove to me, you have the receipts that you're doing everything right. The numbers are not working and your body is not responding. I know how frustrating that is because I was you for a very, very long time. And here's the thing that I had to learn, that this is not a discipline problem. This is not a knowledge problem because listen, I read everything there was to read about trying to lose weight. So it wasn't a knowledge problem. What I learned— and this is what I want to share with you today— it's an identity problem. And weight loss coaches are not talking about it. So let's keep it real, y'all. Everything the diet industry has sold us for the last 40 years is built on one premise. You manage your food from the outside in. That looks like counting your calories, hitting your macros, tracking your daily caloric expenditure, following this plan. And if it doesn't work, then you have to point the finger at yourself, right? You did— didn't follow it hard enough, or you didn't do your calculations correctly. So what does a smart woman like you do? She follows it harder. She gets more precise. She gets another spreadsheet. She downloads another app. She's like, let me track my steps. Let me track my calories. Let me track how many reps I'm doing. Let me track my weights. Let me track this. Let me track that. She optimizes. And then she adds another layer of data. And basically, essentially, you become the CFO of your own caloric budget. I know because I did this for a very long time. But here is where this theoretically, it breaks down because on paper it sounds like it should make sense, right? If it's calories in versus calories out, and if I'm calculating all of my calories and my basal metabolic rate, then I should be able to lose weight. But here's where all of that math breaks down. The more you manage food from the outside in, the further away you get from your body's actual signals. So your body is literally sending you text messages all day long. It's telling you when it's hungry. It's telling you when it's full. It's telling you when it's satisfied. It's telling you when it's tired. It's telling you, I have a craving for this, and cravings that mean something specific. But if your dieter's brain is so busy running the numbers, looking at your apps, looking at your— comparing your calorie expenditure versus your caloric intake, you can't hear any of that. You can't hear any of the text messages that your body is sending you. Instead, you stop asking yourself like, oh, am I really hungry? But really what you're doing is you're asking yourself, do I have enough calories left? In order to eat something else, right? That disconnect between your brain and your body is exactly why the math stops working, because your body is not a spreadsheet. It is a living, hormonal, emotional, ever-changing system. And after 40, that system gets even more complex. Estrogen shifts, cortisol spikes, sleep changes, and that rigid calorie model that sort of worked in your 30s completely falls apart. I have gotten into arguments on social media with fitness bros who don't understand how complex a woman's body is. They're like, you just need to count your calories, and if they're eating less, if they're in a calorie deficit and they're exercising more, then they should lose weight. And I'm like, y'all, no, that is not cut and dry that does not always work for our bodies, especially after the age of 40. So if you're listening to the fitness bros and you're trying to work harder at a system that was never built for your body, you are going to remain frustrated. So this is what I want to offer today to help you out a little bit. And this solution is not another protocol. It's not a new macro split, and it's not a medication. This solution is really simple, and it's part of the Undieting Your Brain process. And it starts with a very, very simple tool. I mean, so simple, it's basic. It's like Stop Dieting Forever 101. I call it the pause. Put your hand up. Pause, right? This is how I teach it. Pause. And it is so simple, your dieter's brain is going to want to reject it immediately because it doesn't feel like you're doing enough, but I want you to stay with me. The moment you get the urge to eat or drink something, right? Your brain is like, hey, I'm thirsty. Hey, I'm hungry. Hey, I want to get this. Hey, I need to have this. The moment that your brain says, hey, we need to go eat or drink something, before you go into the pantry, before you pick up the phone and open up the Starbucks app, before you walk into the kitchen, Before you check your phone and your MyFitnessPal or whatever calorie counting app, before you look to see how many calories you have left for the day, I want you to stop. I want you to pause, and I'm— I want you to picture— if you're watching the video, you can see my hand, but I want you to picture my hand saying stop, pause. And you set a timer for 20 minutes on your phone and you go do something else. You're busy. Go do the next thing on your to-do list. I know you got something else to do. So that's it. Just set that timer and go do something else. Don't overanalyze it. We like to overthink these things sometimes. Don't go journal about it. What you're doing is you're creating a gap between the urge and the action. You're disrupting this thought pattern of like, oh, I need to go eat. I need to go drink. And when that timer goes off, and if your brain is still like, we need to eat, we need to eat, we need to get, we need to drink, we need to start Starbucks, we need— like, if it's still asking for the food, I want to just ask yourself the question before you fulfill the urge: is this physical hunger or is this emotional hunger? Is this physical hunger I'm feeling or is this emotional hunger? Now, if you're new to the podcast and you're like, I don't know the difference, I want you to go back and listen to episodes 159 to 161. I did a 4-part Hunger series where I did a deep dive into the different types of hunger. So pausing, right, the pause, this 20-minute tool, it breaks this loop. It breaks this— your brain on autopilot before you even realize that you were in this habit of, I need to go eat, and then you go fulfill that urge immediately. So that 20-minute pause does something that your tracking app could never do. It interrupts the automatic pattern. And here's what your dieter's brain does. It sees calories remaining and it treats it like a budget that needs to be spent. So at the end of the day, you're like, oh, I have 400 calories left, I should probably eat something. That is not hunger, that is accounting. Okay, the pause is going to create space between the stimulus and the response. And in that space of those 20 minutes— that is it— your body gets a chance to actually tell you what it needs, which is the beginning of what I call body literacy. And that is the beginning of your new identity. That is the beginning of you beginning to undiet your brain and you stop thinking like a dieter. It's very simple when I explain it, but it's not always as easy to do at first because it's a new way of thinking and your brain is going to be like, but wait, I just said I want something to eat. I'm used to you giving me something to eat right now. So you're going to have this little bit of a cognitive dissonance as you do it, but it's very powerful. The more often that you do it. And it is so simple and it's not going to take you any extra time on top of anything else that you're doing. I'm interrupting this podcast episode because I want to answer the question that I get a lot. How can I work with you, Jennifer? Here's the thing. There is no one way to lose weight. And I know that might sound surprising coming from a weight loss coach, but this is what I teach. I teach bio-individuality. I mean it. Because your body is different from my body, and my body is different from her body over there. Your hormone— hormones are not my hormones. Your history, your schedule, your stress load, your relationship with food, your family life, your career, your work schedule— none of it is the same. So a cookie-cutter program was never going to work for you, and deep down you already knew that. This is why I work with clients privately inside Forever Well private weight loss and life coaching, we build a plan built around your life, your, your labs, your schedule, your identity. And every week we're working on exactly what is keeping you stuck. And the results that you will see are not just weight loss, but it is a completely different relationship with food. I want you to imagine sitting down at a dinner table on vacation or at a celebration on a Tuesday night with your family. And not doing a single calculation of calories in your head. No calories, no macros, no mental math running in the background while you're supposed to be present listening to your kid talk about what happened in school today. Just eating, just enjoying food, just living and being a human. That is what Forever Well coaching will give you. If you are ready to find out what your plan looks like, I want you to go to jenniferdent.com and apply for a free weight loss consultation. It is a real conversation with me. You will leave knowing exactly what has been keeping you stuck, whether you work with me or not. And for those of you who are new to the podcast, on Fridays I send out a newsletter called Stop Dieting Forever Friday, which goes a little bit deeper into the topic of the week, whatever we covered in the podcast. So this Friday, if you're not already subscribed and part of my email club, you can go to jenniferdent.com/emailclub to get on the list to get the next step of what you can do as it relates to today's episode. And you're going to see a real example that you're going to be able to see yourself in. So go get on the list at jenniferdent.com/emailclub. All right, let's get back to the episode. So we've talked about the pause, right? The 20-minute pause, the stupidly simple tool that you can do to disrupt your automatic eating habits. I want to tell you about a woman that I recently spoke with. Brilliant. She's a CFO. She's, she's super smart, kind of woman who, when something is broken, she figures out why and fixes it. That is her professional superpower. And I get that so much because when I was professionally a management consultant, Literally, my job was to fix problems. It was to improve performance. It was to go into companies, assess their, uh, process, and come up with a solution using critical thinking. And then the tools that we had available to us as consultants, my brain is wired to do that. So, when I needed to lose weight, I approached the weight loss problem the same way that I would approach a problem with a, a client. In corporate. So this amazing woman came to me during a consultation. She has like 5 years of food journals. She had a spreadsheet. She was tracking all of her labs. She had all of her DEXA scans. She had all of her macro ratios that she had ever tried. She had done a GLP-1, lost 10 pounds, stopped taking it because of a side effect and ended up gaining the weight back. She knew her RMR from her last body composition scan. She knows exactly how much body fat she has. On her body. She knows everything. She read actual clinical studies on weight loss. She wasn't reading blogs. She was reading clinical studies to understand the science, to figure out the problem that she was having with her weight. And she had done all of this work and had not lost meaningful weight in years. And when I asked her about what she thought— no, what was she thinking before she ate? She said, I'm not paraphrasing, she said, I look at how many calories I have left and I figure out how to allocate them appropriately. I get that so much, y'all. I can look at a piece of chicken and I can tell you like how much it weighs and how many calories and grams of protein are in it because my brain has been focused on that and thinking in that way for decades when I was trying to lose weight. So I get it, right? Her intelligence had become a wall between her and her own body. Every signal that her body was sending to her, her brain immediately translated into a data point and managed it away. So the food was never the issue. It was the identity. It was the way that she was thinking about food and thinking about her body. She had been a dieter for so long that she didn't know who she was without doing the tracking. So when I suggested she write down what she ate without the numbers attached, she was like, ooh, that sounds exhausting. Not because it was more work, but because it was different work. You understand what I'm saying here? It was different work. And her dieter's identity didn't know how to exist without those numbers. That is an identity lock. And it is the most common thing that I see in smart, high-achieving women. Like I saw it in myself, right? It's the very skills that make you exceptional at your career. The analysis, the optimization, the relentless drive to solve the problem. That whole mindset became the exact thing that can keep you stuck with your weight when you're in a cycle like this. So for me, when I was in this scenario and I was trying to— working to undiet my brain, the moment that I stopped asking why I was reaching for food, versus whether it fits into my caloric intake for the day, everything started to shift. Not because I had new information, but it was because I started building a new identity and I started questioning why I was eating more often than how much can I still eat. Shift in perspective, shift in, in looking at food and listening to my body. So, you might be thinking, okay, Jennifer, yeah, this sounds like a lot of mindset stuff, but just like, I really need to, I just need a plan. Like, just, just tell me what to do. And listen, I get it. I get it. I love a good plan. I get it completely. Because you are wired to take action, you are an action machine. You identify the problem, you find the solution, you execute the plan, and you produce the results. And that is why you are good what you do. So, when someone says the work is mindset, you hear, "Ooh, mindset. Like, what is that?" You hear passive. You hear like, "That's not real. That's not tangible." And so, what do you do? You're like, "Let me go to the doctor. Let me go see if I can find a physical problem and then they can tell me what to do and they'll give me a plan. Let me go get more lab work done. Let me try a new protocol. Let me download a new app. Let me start collecting new data." because all of those things feel like you're being productive. It all feels like you're doing something. And those are what we call actions. So, I really, I want to go over something very quickly that I teach. It's called the self-coaching tool. It's called the self-coaching model. And it's what I teach all of my clients. And it was created by Brooke Castillo, the founder of the Life Coach School, which is where I have my life coach certification. So, you have circumstances in your life, and the circumstances are neutral facts, like your weight, the size of your clothes, and it's just data. It is a fact. It is something that you can prove in court. Then you have thoughts, and those are thoughts, what you think about those facts, like your weight, and your thoughts cause feelings. They create feelings. Feelings are just a vibration in your body. And when you have these feelings, it drives you to do things. It drives your actions or your inactions, and then you create a result, but your actions are downstream of your feelings and your feelings are downstream of your thoughts. So if the thought process hasn't changed at the top, no amount of action at the bottom of that model is gonna change what comes out. And that is not therapy. That is not journaling your feelings. That is the most rigorous results-producing work you will ever do. When you understand this, because when that thought changes, everything downstream changes with it— your feelings, your actions, and ultimately the results that you want, which is weight loss. And so when you follow this model, your weight loss is inevitable as long as you don't quit. But where do most women try to change their results? Where do they try to lose weight from? They try at the A-line, the action line. They try to do more steps, more tracking, more restriction, bigger calorie deficit. They try to do, do, do, do, do more, which is more time, more energy, more frustration. You are doing enormous amounts of heavy lifting, enormous, spending so much energy and time focusing on the doing, but you're lifting at the wrong level. The real work that you need to be focusing on 80% of your time needs to really move that needle. It's not the tracking, it's not the plan, it's not the protocol. It is working on changing your thoughts. And this is what we do inside Forever Well Weight Loss and Life Coaching. One of the first things that you're going to discover, I'm going to walk you through my Core Why activity. And here we're not creating a vague goal. We're not just picking an arbitrary number that you want to reach. We're going to dig deep and find a reason so specific and so personal that when your brain tries to pull you back to the old ones 1.0 familiar patterns, and it will try, this core why reason will knock that out the box. It will win every single time. If you want to learn more about the core why, go back to episode 270, How to Lose Weight Consistently Even When You're Not Motivated. And in that episode, I talk about the power of the core why, and I share some of my clients' results with using the core why activity. The other thing that we do that is different in my coaching program that you won't find in any other weight loss program is we're going to build your future you, what I call the 2.0 version of yourself. Right now, your dieter's brain is your 1.0 version of yourself, and that identity is keeping you stuck at the same weight. We got to learn how to, like, let that go, but we have to be able to replace it with something. Right now, you don't know how to replace it because if you did, you would have already done that. So we're going to build this 2.0 version of yourself. The woman who already knows how to handle the hard moments at dinner. She already knows that she's not going to cancel her workout just because she gets on the scale and the number is higher than what she thought it was going to be. She's the one that doesn't spiral after she goes out to eat with her family or with her friends. She doesn't need the numbers to feel safe because her reason is bigger than the discomfort. That is powerful, y'all. When you get to that place, everything changes. But if you're not— if you don't know how to get to that place, this is why diets fail, because they only ever touch the A-line. They never went upstream to your thoughts, to the T-line. So the PAUSE method, which I taught you today, starts you at that thought line, right? That 20 minutes isn't just about the food, it's a pattern disruptor. It's about catching that thought that was driving you towards the food before you even knew it was happening. And that, my friend, is the work. And that is what changes everything. Here's what I want to leave you with. Nothing has gone wrong. Nothing has gone wrong. I don't care how frustrated you are, how many things you have tried, nothing has gone wrong. You are in the right place at the right time. You are meant to be listening to me in this moment. And you are, are not someone who just can't figure it out. You are just someone who has been running an outdated operating system and working incredibly hard at it, but you're working on the wrong thing. You're throwing your energy into the wrong place, in the wrong direction, and you wonder why these results that you want, they keep disappearing. The PAUSE method is your starting point, right? Before you eat anything this week, anything, just for shits and giggles, for fun, set the timer. Ask yourself the question, is this physical or is this emotional? Just ask. Don't logically think your way into eating. Just ask your body. And you don't have to change what you eat, right? You don't have to overhaul your life. You're just building the pause into your everyday eating. The pause is the beginning of the undieting of your brain. And the pause is when your future you, your 2.0 identity, gets a chance to show up and show out. And I want to remind you of something that I say to every single client that I work with. If you are ready to stop quitting and start building, right, this life and this body that you want, if you want to plan specifically for your body after 40 with your schedule and your life and your history, I want you to go to jenniferdent.com to apply for a free weight loss consultation. We will talk about everything that has been keeping you stuck and whether Forever Well weight loss and life coaching is the right fit for you. Is that the next best step for you? You have already worked hard enough at this. Let's just make your work work for you differently. All right, y'all, live luxe, and I will see you in the next episode. Did you love today's episode? Are you loving this podcast? Then you're going to love Forever Well, which is my exclusive newsletter where I break down how to stop self-sabotaging your weight loss and reinvent yourself into the healthy, grown-ass, confident woman you know you want to be. Girl, each week I'm going to send you bold insights, real talk, because you know I like to keep it real, material and strategies that you can actually use to start your diet-free lifestyle straight to your inbox. Subscribe now at jenniferdent.com/emailclub or find the link in the show notes and start your reinvention today. Oh, and if you love this episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review because it helps more women just like you find this life-changing work. All right, y'all, head on over to jenniferdent.com/emailclub to get Forever Well. All right, live luxe, and I'll see you in the next episode.