5 Diet Mistakes To AVOID Over 40 - #4 Is CRITICAL!

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If you're over 40 and trying to lose weight, make sure you're not making any of these five diet mistakes. Even making just one of them could get in the way of you losing fat and instead cause you to gain weight. Now, I've been working in the weight weight loss world for over 35 years and these are things that you may be doing to get healthy that could actually be sabotaging your weight loss efforts. So here's the first one. Counting calories rather than macros. Calories count, but where they come from counts more because of the hormonal impact of food. There's three macros. I'm going to show you how this all plays out. They are protein, fat and carbohydrates. So protein in terms of the macronutrients is the most thermic. What's that mean? It burns more calories for your body to be able to assimilate it, use it, put it to use on your body. And really, I want you to think of protein more as function rather than fuel. Because while it can be used as a fuel source, it's really put together to build your body. Protein not only is thermic, it also has better satiety than the other macronutrients. It helps you feel fuller longer because it releases GLP1 and PYY. These are neuropeptides that are satiety neuropeptides. Plus it slows down stomach emptying. So all these things say you eat.

Protein, you're not as hungry.

We've been eating protein all wrong. Our protein RDA is ridiculous. It's so much lower than it should be. We need to eat at least twice of what that RDA is. So where it says 0.8 grams per kilogram of weight is what you should be eating. First of all, we're in the United States. We do pounds. I say 0.8 grams per pound of ideal body weight. So that's first, and that's where I start to build my plate when I'm looking at macros is I know that if I'm eating 0.8 grams per pound of ideal body weight, let's do the math. Let's say that that's 150 pound person. So 0.8 would be 80, 40 would be 120 grams. 120 grams. I'm eating three meals. That means that I need to get 40 grams at each meal. So there you go. So that really important to start the day with protein. So 40 grams of protein each meal, that's first. Next, carbohydrates. Now, carbohydrates, when you eat them, are going to raise your blood sugar and make your body release insulin to bring the blood sugar back to normal levels and to be able to use that carbohydrate, get it into the fuels. Right, What I really want you to focus on first are non starchy vegetables. So right here, next up on the plate are non starchy veggies. And what I want you to think of here is eating at least five servings a day. A serving is a half a cup of cooked or a cup of raw. So once you've done those two things, then you can look at having some carbs from what I call slow, low carbs. And these should be whole foods based, plant based. And it's fruit, it's tubers, it's roots, it's beets, it's wild rice, it's winter squashes, legumes, fruit, it's a cup. The rest of those things, it's about a half a cup. And for those, the slow, low carbs, this is 0 to 10 to 2 servings per meal right now with these macros. Quality, super duper with all of them. Quality matters, but especially when we're looking at carbohydrates. You want whole foods, carbohydrates because they come with lots of fiber. That slows down the blood sugar response. Remember, carbohydrates cause a blood sugar rise, bigger the blood sugar rise bigger the insulin response. High insulin, more fat storing. Next up is fat. And fat's really hormone neutral. The very worst combination that you could possibly do is eat high fat and high carbs because you have that big insulin response with a lot of caloric density of the fat. And it's just like, boom, let's store it on in. So what you want to think about with fats are eating whole types of Fats first, avocado, wild fish, et cetera. And then being very careful with the oils you choose, like extra virgin olive oil being my favorite there. When you're eating fat, again, it just, it's kind of like you don't really need to expend its calories for digestion. It's just really, really easy for your body to use for fuel or store. First thing you're going to do, and we'll have this in the video description notes so you can get this here is determine your macros by starting with the protein calcul. That's where I want you to go first, is build your plate around protein, add in non starchy vegetables, see what kinds of fat you have there. Because you should get two to four fat servings per meal. You might have enough between putting some extra virgin olive oil on your salad and having wild salmon. And then see if you need a little slow, low carb. Maybe you're going to have some blueberries for dessert and that might be fine. But let's focus on macros, not calories. Because if we're focusing on calories, you might just say, you know what? I'm going to eat a thousand calories a day. I think I'll just eat Snickers bars. Obviously, that would have a really poor hormonal response. So number two, cutting down on protein. Now, I just kind of did my rant on protein, but I'm going to go a little deeper here because our protein recommendations are basically from the dark ages. Well, not really, but they're from World War II and they were really when we were rationing things and it was there to protect us from deficiencies and starvation. It's not there. The RDA does not optimize your health. Here's what I want you to think of and I'm going to talk grams per ideal body weight. And this is really important because again, you're going to figure out your ideal body weight by looking at a heightened frame chart and then looking at your range and knowing the number that works best for you. Where do you feel you're best in that range? And so when you do that, the very minimum I say is 0.6 grams per pound of ideal body weight. My ideal is 0.8. And then if you're in a big phase of recovery, under a lot of stress or really working on putting on muscle mass, or you're trying to both lose fat and put on muscle, which if you're trying to do that and you're fit, fairly challenging. But boy, you really have to focus on protein. If you're doing that, then I'm going to focus on one. So if your ideal body weight is 150 pounds, then you got 120 grams of protein. If you divide that into three meals, that's 40 grams of protein per meal, right? And remember, plant based sources here are not going to get you as far as animal based sources. Oftentimes they're low or deficient in one or more of the essential amino acids which we have. We're getting 20 from our animal based foods we need, there's nine that we need we can't make ourselves and so we have to get them from our diet. So overall you're going to be able to get more of this, more bioavailability, better protein quality from animals. But remember, you are what you eat ate. Now, some of the things you can do here to help you are to use. I have my protein shakes, my Reignite wellness protein shakes and my collagen. And these are things I use every day, especially for the morning when I do my loaded smoothie to make sure that I'm starting the day with at least 30 grams of protein. And those bumper meals are so important, your morning and evening. So make sure you're getting your protein in those meals for sure. That is the most important. The third thing I still remember in the 80s when all of a sudden everything went low fat, fat free. Do you remember this? Do you remember growing up on all this? Like, they're fat free, it's low fat, we can have as much as we want, it's fine. Here's the challenge with that. We know that that was a big fat lie. Cutting down on fat did not bring us the promised land that it said it would. And it left us hungry and more insulin resistant. And here's the deal. We can live without carbs, but we can't live without protein and fat. Our brains and hormones need fat to thrive. And fat supports your skin health as you age too. And making an oil change, having the right types of fat lowers inflammation. Fat's key critical helps our body make steroid hormones like cortisol and estrogen and progesterone and testosterone. It helps us produce cholesterol. And by the way, if you've been trained to think cholesterol is evil, you need cholesterol to make hormones. But the quality again is key. You got to make an oil change, which means you got to get rid of the canola oils, the corn oils, even the healthy sounding ones like safflower oils. Why because so many of these in the processing got rancid and they tend to be higher in these omega 6pro inflammatory fats. What you want to do is go for whole fats first, so things like wild fish, nuts and seeds, avocados, olives, then with your extra fat that you can have, then you go to oils. And if I'm using oils, I tend to stick with extra virgin olive oil or I'll use some ghee, or I'll use some coconut oil. Those tend to be the ones that I use the most of. Plus I take Omega 3s every single day. I take my omega ultras from Reignite Wellness every single day. Because there's great research showing that Omega 3s can help slow the aging process. In fact, There was a 2022 review in the Biomolecular Concept. This one showed that omega 3 fatty acids may possibly affect telomeres. What are they? Telomeres protect our DNA and they get shorter as we age. They get shorter when you're stressed. When they get shorter, they're contributing to all these age related diseases. So we really, really, really want to maintain the length of our telomeres. And fish oil and good essential omega 3 fatty acids are one way to do this. Now there was other research and this one from the aging research reviews showed that omega 3 fatty acids can slow age related cognitive decline and may also protect against the risk of dementia. So there's a test if you're wondering, if you're like, well, how do I know if I'm getting enough omega 3s? The omega 3 index test is a great test. It's a blood test used to measure the level of omega 3 fatty acids in red blood cells. And it's used to determine the risk of heart disease. It's one of the single best indicators of overall omega 3 status in the body. And omega 3 status is going to reflect both your dietary intake and how well you are converting plant and fish oils. So super important. And number four mistake is not taking enzymes for protein and fat. I don't know if you've noticed, but as we age, your digestive enzymes decrease and your stomach acid decreases. What happens when you do this is now you cannot get the nutrition from your food, right? And we know besides age making this worse, stress really makes this worse. We know stress lowers stomach acid, right, as well as making leaky gut. And the bottom line is you are only what you absorb. So if you're eating super healthy but you're having absorption issues, right, you got a problem. And one of the ways you can tell if you have this. It's not the only way. But gas and bloating is a great sign of, like, you're needing enzymes. And that's where I really feel like you need to give enzymes a trial. And especially now with that 30 grams or more of protein per meal, you really want to make sure that you're able to break down and digest that protein. And I find the places that we tend to have the biggest issues are with protein digestion and fat digestion. So you want a well rounded digestive enzyme that has lipase. Lipase works for fat digestion and proteases for protein digestion so that you can break down these macros. I also love betaine hcl because it helps with protein breakdown as well. If you look at the things that can really impact your stomach acid, stress, aging, any kind of infection, a lot of the different medications, those are going to affect your stomach acid. And if your stomach acid is lower, well, now you're not absorbing your nutrients. So little malnutrition, you'll have indigestion. It's kind of like that feeling of eating, but it's just sitting there, right? It can cause small intestinal bacterial overgrowth because you're not able to get the food out of your stomach. Then the migrating motor complex and into the small intestine you can't clean out. And it can cause different kinds of microbial infections because the stomach acid isn't there to kill things off. Another thing I love is ox bile extract because it helps eliminate toxins and can clear excess cholesterol. When you look at your ideal digestive enzyme, it's going to have at least things to help with protein and fat. It's also great if it can help with some of the problematic ingredients that can cause food intolerances, you know, like gluten and dairy. So there's special enzymes that can help break down gluten. It's called DPP gluten 4. And there's also different enzymes that can help break down dairy. Big important thing here is you want to take these before you eat, if at all possible. They're less effective after you eat. Sometimes I realize I ate and I'm like, darn it, I still take it. But it's not as good as if you take it 10, 20 minutes before your meal. So you get your digestive juices going. If I'm going out to dinner, the first thing I do when I sit down to dinner is get sparkling water and I take my enzymes and I end up giving them to everybody at the table because they're like, what are those? It's just kind of that ritual at home. You can just leave them out so you remember to do it. Number five is not eating enough cruciferous vegetables. And my rule is at least five servings a day of non starchy vegetables. More is better. So I'm going to go 5 to 10 servings of raw and cooked. So raw is a cup, cooked is a half a cup. There is so much nutrient density in your non starchy vegetables. You'll get folate, you'll get vitamin C, E and K. You're going to get all these phytonutrients, all these polyphenols that are so important for your gut microbiome. Plus you got fiber, which is key important for a couple different reasons. Number one, slows down stomach emptying, helps you feel fuller, longer. It's great for detoxification, great for pulling, you know, detoxifying the bad estrogens, detoxifying the cholesterols, gives you poops you can be proud of, adds bulk to your stool. So just, I mean, like, there's nothing I can say that's not fabulous about these non starchy vegetables here. They're also going to help you, like if you sit down to eat and you have protein and non starchy vegetables and you take your time, likely you're not going to overeat because you'll be one of the things that are important. And you've heard eat from the rainbow, eat by the rainbow, right? And you wonder why, because the polyphenols are in these non starchy vegetables and the colors mean different things. There's quercetin, sulforaphane, lycopene, lutein. All these things are due to different colors. So that's why you want these bright colors of like the red onion and the broccoli and the yellow peppers, right? And one other really cool thing that you get from non starchy vegetables on some of them is you get some prebiotics. So things like broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, collard greens, kale, radish, rutabaga, these all have prebiotics. And prebiotics act like fertilizer for your gut bacteria. So they basically are like food to help your gut bacteria, the good ones flourish. Other thing they do, and I kind of mentioned a little bit, is they can help detoxify estrogens. So perimenopause, as you know, perimenopause normally begins in your 40s. And this is where Your hormones start to go down. Estrogen, everything, Progesterone, estrogen, testosterone are going down. But sometimes progesterone's going steeper down more than estrogen. So you can become estrogen dominant so the ratio comes off. Or you'll start to have more of the bad estrogens that you need to detoxify. And you really need to support the liver in the processing and eliminating of excess estrogen, because a lot of that is what's giving you those really rotten menopause symptoms. And what's cool is cruciferous vegetables contain this compound called indole 3 carbonyl. And what that indole 3 carbonyl I3C does is it helps move excess estrogen through the detox pathways so that it can be eliminated. There was a nutrition reviews journal talked about how this can all of these veggies can reduce the risk of hormonal related cancers through this whole process of detoxifying them out. And that means breast cancer, endometrial cancer, cervical cancer. And I'm talking specifically about, I was calling the stinky vegetables brussels sprouts and cabbage and cauliflower and broccoli and kale. And big, big shout out to broccoli sprouts like, that's the best of all. There's actually no established recommendation. There's not like a dose, oh, you need to have this much broccoli a day. But There was a 2000 study in pharmacological research that recommended at least five servings a week of those specific ones. But I think we can get that in every single day. You know, one day broccoli, one day cauliflower, one day brussels sprouts. That's actually what we do at home, is we rotate them every single day as we get older. Sorry, I had to say it. We just can't get away with the same diet mistakes we used to make in our 20s and 30s. We don't have that margin for error of our youth. So for a deeper dive on supporting your health after 40, especially as you start to move through menopause, check out my menopause playlist to learn how to lose weight and feel great through menopause, going keto through menopause, and how to master the transition so you look and feel better than ever.

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