How to Use Diet Variation to Break a Weight Loss Plateau with Karen Martel

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Once I got into this world, I realized we're in an epidemic of weight loss resistance. This just isn't happening to a small select few. This is happening to countless women across the board.

Here's jj, Virgin triple board certified nutrition and fitness expert and four time New York Times best selling author. It's time to reignite wellness.

So I actually trademarked this phrase, your body is in a bank account.

It's a chemistry lab.

Because I'm on a mission to change the way that we think about weight loss.

The calories in, calories out, out model.

Like could we just.

Why has this not been blown up yet?

Well, we're going to blow it up today on this show I've got Karen Martell with me. She is a certified transformational nutrition coach and a women's weight loss expert and founder of the On Track Women's Hormone balancing and weight loss program. She also has a podcast, the Other side of Weight Loss. And this all came through her struggling with her own health issues and I always think that's the best place to start. And so she helps women break through weight loss resistance and find their own personal weight loss coach. She's got a super cool quiz with meal plans that she is sharing with all of us that you can get@jjvirgin.com variety and you'll understand when you're on the interview why I picked variety as the cool thing to do.

So.

So there's that. All right, I am going to do a shout out right now to core training Pilates. Five stars says Love these talks on my walks. I'm a Pilates trainer and business owner. JJ's talks are so informative that I often share many bits of info with my clients. JJ and our guests have great advice.

But have fun while giving it. Keep it up.

Ah, thank you.

These shout outs are like my fave thing to do. So I would love to shout you out.

So if you're listening, rate and review and leave your name so I can.

Shout you out too.

And now I'm Going to share another favorite. And then I'll be back to talk about how to break through weight loss resistance. Stay with me.

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Hey, Karen. Welcome. Glad to have you here.

Thanks for having me, jg I'm excited to be here.

Well, we always love to talk about weight loss. Always. Always. It's my favorite subject of all. And before we dig into, we're going to talk weight loss plateaus and diet variation.

All sorts of cool stuff. What got you into this?

Well, of course, my journey started after having children. Doesn't it all. Doesn't that happen to so many women? It's like you have kids and boom, your body does not cooperate any longer. So that happened to me. I. I had my first child. Lost the pregnancy weight right away. And then about a year and A half later, I just started gaining weight for no reason. I was always a pretty healthy eater and I started gaining weight and I was doing what, you know, every woman's told to do, and I was exercising. I calorie counted. I tried every.

That works so well, so good.

I try. I literally.

Isn't it crazy that this does not work? And yet it's still like. It's like, when is that urban legend going to die? If you look at just the research.

On caloric restriction.

Back in the day, when I was first starting all this 30 plus years ago, it was like, create a 500 calorie deficit and it's like your body's a bank account. And I was like, it's not working. It's not working for any of my clients. And in fact, I had one client who was the classic one that this happens to when they go on that long term caloric restriction is she'd so downshifted her metabolism that she went over 1000 calories a day. She gained weight. I mean, it was so awful. So, I mean, what do we know about that? If you cut calories like that, your body downshifts. So it's like, not only does it not work, it really messes you up. Like, it's just blah. All right, so you discovered that our bodies are not a bank account.

No.

And then what happened?

I started working out harder than I ever did.

That's what I'll do next boot camp.

I was just doing it all. And I continued gaining weight and I also continued getting a whole other slew of issues from chronic migraines, insomnia, low sex drive. I, I had a big belly on me. It was all in my gut. I mean, I'm, I'm in my early 30s. Okay, so.

And of course your friends are thinking that you're eating like donuts.

Oh, totally.

Yeah.

Yes. And. And I.

She's cheating.

I gotta like, cut back on the food I'm eating or it's the diet. And I pretty much, you're eating like.

A gerbil or a hamster at some point.

I mean, I certainly. It ended up that I did kind of find my, my way of eating, which we can talk about. But what really, what it came down to was I decided that I, I had a hormone problem after doing all. I'm a researcher and I just started digging into it because nobody seemed to be able to help me. I read every diet book. I did all the exercise. Nothing was working. So I dug in and I'm like, I think I'VE got a hormone problem at 33. And sure enough, I got my hormones tested. And, you know, I had too high estrogen, I had too low progesterone, I had all of these cortisol problems. Dhea, probably. I mean, I looked like I was.

But, like, did you go to any doctors during this time with all of these things going sideways and no one suggested that possibly it was a hormonal issue with something with your chemistry lab, not your.

Well, like my doctor, bless her heart, she's actually great.

Oh, my gosh, you're from Canada, not the south, did you just say? I'm living in the south now, so.

It'S bless her heart.

I was like. I was like, that's got a little underlying meaning to it. Yeah. Bless her heart.

I do. I just. So great.

In the South. That's not what they mean when they say bless her heart, by the way.

Oh, really?

Oh, no, no, no. Anyway, go ahead.

I'm Canadian, everyone.

All right. She's Canadian. You can hear it with the boat. So.

I. Yeah, you know, they tested. She tested my tsh. She didn't test anything past that. I didn't get progesterone or estrogen, cortisol, especially back then. That's not. At 33, they're not going to do that. My naturopath had agreed. He thought, okay, well, yeah, okay, let's test your hormones. And he. He's great. And so we tested my hormones and sure enough, I had all these problems and then my doctor got on board. But it wasn't till, you know, eight years later did my doctor actually find the thyroid problem. Even so, it just was like. And it's not only that, jj, there was so much other stuff going on. There was a lot of stress in my life. I was a single mom. That whole gig. Yeah, I had a lot of emotional garbage that I also had to deal with that came out at the same time. Like, it was all of this, like, kind of perfect storm that I had to suddenly deal with. And it wasn't a quick fix. It wasn't a 30 day lose 20 pounds because I found my hormone solution. No. This was a two year journey of figuring out what my body needed to eat, what my hormones needed, and what my emotional and spiritual side needed as well.

Yes. And that is why it is so critical. All my friends are doctors and doctors. You want to have your team, your health team, but ultimately you are the CEO of it and you have to lead the team because no one's in your body with you. And so you've gotta be so super clear on the symptoms. And, like, the first time, like, I actually knew when my thyroid started to go down because I'd been teaching classes on weight loss resistance for years. So I was like going, oh, thyroid. You know, I knew when my estrogen went down. And that's what we really have to get to. We have to understand, like, okay, here's my ideal normal. Not my crappy normal. Here's where I feel ideally right. Cause I think most people don't. You agree, Karen? Have no idea what feeling good feels like. Like, they have no idea. Like, they have no idea. So they're like, going, oh, but it's normal for me to, like, you know, wake up five times during the night. It's normal for me to be bloated after me, I'm like, no, it's not normal. No, it's not. So, all right, so you go on this journey, you finally, you're. You've taken this in, become the researcher, become CEO of your body. Then what happens?

So I. I lost the weight. And at the time I was in, I was doing a lot of. I did body work. I did something called Rolfing, and I did the deep tissue body work. And I started to not notice people's body as when it. When there was something wrong. Like, I could tell when someone had a food sense. Oh, you're a Ross.

Like, you do Rolfing?

I did, yes. 17 years.

Such an amazing therapy. That, like, why isn't that everywhere? It's incredible.

Because it hurts.

I know, but it's like. But it does. It's, like, so amazing.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Okay.

Yes. 17 years, I did that. And I started to notice when women would have hormone imbalance, when they're. When they had food sensitivities by the stuff they would tell me and me working on their body. And then because I had gone through this transition myself, I was, like, starting to counsel people on this. And it was just a natural. Like, you know, what if. If I went through this, there's got to be how many other women that feel as though they're doing everything right? They're exercising, they're eating well, they're healthy people, and they still can't lose weight. And once I got into this world, I realized we're in an epidemic of weight loss resistance. This just isn't happening to a small select few. This is happening to countless women across the board.

Yep. I remember early on, I was on Dr. Phil's weight loss challenges, leading him through, and he had a chapter in his book called Weight Loss Resistance. This was, gosh, now, I don't know, 14 years ago. And it was all about insulin resistance. But it made me start to look at. Because I already knew that it wasn't a calorie thing. It was like, all right, what are the other things? Insulin's one, cortisol's one. Sex hormones are one. All of the issues going on with your GI are there's so many things when you start to get into it that can create problems. And the inability to lose weight is just a symptom. We all tend to think, this is the thing. I go, that's not the thing. Like, that's a sign that there's things going wrong, right?

Yes.

And we got to get to that, because I think there's so much shame and judgment around weight. And, like, what I discovered early on is people who are trying to lose weight were usually the most knowledgeable.

Yes.

They were eating healthier than the average person. You know, I mean, it was like.

They spent more money on programs and doctors and naturopaths. And I just talked to a woman yesterday. She was like, I have spent so much money and so much time. Not one person has ever told me it spent my hormones. She went like. And here she is, the classic hormone imbalance.

I used to teach a course for doctors called Overcoming Weight Loss Resistance for a couple of years prior to the virgin diet. That was with the trademark line. Your body's not bank accounts. Chemistry lab, teaching them all the areas that could get in the way of you losing weight or cause you to gain weight. So people would get off this idea that, you know, I mean, I'm sure there's the person who's sitting. And I talked to the doctor who was the doctor for the Biggest Loser, and he goes, no, it is just these people are not exercising enough. I haven't exercised in at least an hour. I'm like, oh, my gosh, you're the problem. You're the problem, dude. You know, you. You man there, who's never had a weight issue in your life, who has a judgment, you know, prejudice against anyone who's overweight, believing that they're just sitting home lying on the couch eating cupcakes. And that is not. That's the 1% of the people that I ever see who are struggling.

Yeah.

All right.

Exactly.

So with all of this finding. Tell me now where you're at with this, because I know now that you've really gotten into this. So you moved out of Rolfing and became a transformational nutritionist Yes, I did.

And I started working with women specifically on weight loss resistance. And I've, I have now, in the last year or so, of course, dove into a lot of the low carb dieting stuff, right? Ketogenic. I've always been a very. My diet is paleo. I've been on paleo since that time when I first figured all of this out. And I realized that that was the diet that made me feel best, that wasn't challenging. I didn't have to calorie count, it took no willpower. And in the last year, I've been probably two years I've been put helping women with the lower kind of ketogenic type style diets, because as you know, they're all the rage. And I have in the last, probably six months or so, I have been seeing a lot of repercussions coming out of this low carb movement. And I started to kind of pile together all of my research as far as what does it really take to lose weight and keep it off. We've got one, one hand, we've got a lot of people that are saying you need carbohydrates in order for your metabolism to run properly. And then you have these, the low carbers that are saying something completely different. All you need is ketones. And this is, you know, will make you quickly lose weight, et cetera, et cetera, which it does. But what we're seeing is a weight loss stall almost across the board. For every single person that I have put on a ketogenic diet, at some point, and usually quite early, three to six months, they hit a stall and it stops. And this is when we're talking weight loss plateau. So not only is it weight loss resistance, but it's a serious weight loss plateau as well. And so what is happening here, that's, that is kind of where I'm, what the road I am going down now is what is happening? Why do we hit this weight loss stall on these low carb diets? And what is happening to the metabolism?

Okay, so the question is, so then is what is, why are we hitting this stall? What's going on?

So with the low carb movement, for all of you that have tried it or on it, you know that it really stamps out hunger.

That's the, and I think here's the, here's the challenge with low carb is let's define it, because low carb could be 40% carbohydrates, but when we're talking, you know, a ketogenic diet, that's not what we're talking about, you know, because that's still classically. I always like when they say it's a high protein diet and I'm like, no it's not. High protein would have to be like 60%. Like this is not a high protein diet. And you know, so when you look at low carb, low carb could be a 40% carb diet, 30%, 20% temperature, and those are very markedly different. And what how your body handles things and what energy system it's going to use primarily for fuel. So when you're talking low carb, you're really talking more in like that 10% range, right?

Yes. But I also see it in just simply low carb when people are going under that 50 total a day. People, you know, so that can be ketogenic, but it can also be Atkins and it can some higher protein diets. I've seen it happen as well. Even with Paleo. I've seen it when people are going to low carb with Paleo, depending on who they are, of course, but definitely in the key when we're talking straight up ketogenic, when you're like 70% keto of your calories is coming from fat, 100% your, your appetite becomes extremely suppressed. And this is the beauty of it and also the downfall of it because people will lose a ton of weight right off the get go. So you can see people that I lost 10 pounds my first week and 20 pounds my first month and 30, you know, and it's this massive weight loss for the first couple months.

Well, they're also keeping their glycogen stores low. So when you look at what the ketogenic diet's going to do, yes, it's going to suppress appetite, which seems great, but we're supposed to have an appetite and right then we'll lose our carbohydrate stores in our muscles, which carbohydrates bind with water to stores glycogen in your muscles. So that weighs something. So some of that's like, okay, well.

What did you really lose?

Did you lose fat? What are you losing? Right, so, all right, so what are you seeing then as the repercussions? And what is your. You talk about diet variation. So let's get into like, how do you break that plateau? What are you seeing as the repercussions of someone who's in this type of diet? It's not the most effective for et cetera.

So what we see starting to happen is calorie intake starts to go down farther and farther. And so it works in the beginning because it's true when a calorie deficit in the beginning, your body will lose weight. And so as you go into it farther, your caloric intake tends to go down. I just talked to a woman yesterday who was like three, all proud of herself because she ate only two meals a day. And she wanted to stick with that because that's what worked for her, even though I'm like, not working because you're coming to see me. But she was down to 700 calories a day and had been doing that for a year and was wondering why she didn't have a metabolism anymore and she thought this was normal. But, jj, you go onto the forums right now on the keto forums, and you hear it everywhere. These people saying, I'm down to one meal a day. I'm fasting for however many hours. I fast for two days out of the week. I fast here, I fast there. Fasting is great. It can help you to lose weight. But if you start doing it every single day and now your caloric intake is down to 5 to 700 calories a day, it is inevitable that your metabolism will slow down to meet that caloric intake, Period. It doesn't matter. So. But in our heads, and especially in women, we're like, oh, my gosh, but it works so well.

Less is more.

And they hold on to it. They hold on to it, but it works so good. So less is more. Let's cut down on the carbs farther. So, you know, let's go to Carnivore. Let's start fasting more.

Okay, stop. So I gotta tell you, I've heard a little bit about the Carnivore thing, but I've really kind of stayed out of this whole thing because I was like, the Carnivore diet, it reminds me of something. When I was on Freaky Eaters, we had a guy who would only eat meat and especially loved raw meat. That was all he would eat. That is it all he would eat? Yeah, it was absolutely nasty. I'm assuming that's what the Carnivore diet is. Is that what it is, that they're only eating meat? Really? Wow. Yes.

Yes. And given, like, I. I interviewed someone called Sean, Dr. Sean Baker, who's this massive weightlifting guy. He's. He's a doctor.

Where are they getting their fiber? What about their.

Oh, no, he's eating. All he eats is beef. That's it.

Wow.

For two years, Dr. Ken Berry. There's many, many that swear by It. It's really great for autoimmune conditions. It's great for the brain. It can work for people with anxiety and depression, but it's not for everybody. No. And there are long term. Actually, they don't know if there's long term.

Yeah, we wouldn't know yet, but it's. I would just look at, like, where's your fiber and your antioxidants? But anyway. All right, so I digress. I just wanted to pull in that.

Okay, so.

What is your recommendation then? Like, if someone's hitting this plateau because they've now really hijacked their metabolism by lowering their caloric intake and slowing everything down, what do they do?

So you still fasting? Caloric restriction works for weight loss, but if you do it too much, you're going to lower your metabolism. So it's finding this happy medium of, you know, correcting your insulin resistance, things like that, and losing the, you know, tapping into your fat stores to burn. You want to do those things, but then you want to cycle out of it and tell your body, hey, we're, you know, we're fine. There's no fat. You know, we're not in a famine. There's lots. There's plenty around. You don't need to lower the metabolism because your body doesn't know. You have to always think that inside your body, it's built for survival. So if it thinks there's only 500 calories coming in, and it's been that way for six months, it's going to shut things down. It's going to slow your thyroid down. It's going to be hard on the adrenal system. We're already. Our adrenal systems are shot because of nowadays. Right. So that impact starts to take its toll. So what you want to do is you want to. You can utilize the ketogenic diet therapeutically for a short period of time to, you know, reverse insulin resistance quite quickly. It works great for that, but very, you know, as soon as you do that within a couple of months, even if not shorter, as soon as you can, you want to start cycling in your carbohydrates, because if not, that's what's going to happen to your body. And it's going to now not be therapeutic anymore, and it's going to be damaging to the system, period.

I had a great doctor who I used to run these certified practitioner workshops with early on, Dr. Diana Schwartzbein, who always said, you need to. And I told her at the time, I go, that's such an unpopular statement. But she said she would often have people gain weight, lose weight. And she said you have to get healthy to lose weight, not lose weight to get healthy. And that's what it strikes me. I'm hoping we'll get to a point that we understand that diets should be used short term and therapeutically. Right. So you shift in and out.

And.

That when you're making those shifts, your weight might go up a little bit in the transition to getting healthier. And that, that is not a cause for freak out, you know, because. Because of that. Because the other one's not sustainable. So how do you deal with people? Because I'm assuming, yes, as when you're taking them through this, that there would be times when their weight's going to come up a little bit, which is normal. And then it's like when you really look at weight loss, it would be short term, therapeutic diet, learn something, shift, go into regular eating patterns, healthy eating, stabilize, go down. And so you go through these cycles. But women who are addicted to seeing the numbers drop on the scale or et cetera, how do you work with them through this, where they might see the numbers go up a little bit or not move at all so they don't freak.

Well, and also for, you know, if you've been going low carb for a really long time, throwing back in carbohydrates will instantly make you gain weight. You'll be overly sensitive to them. So if you've been in it for a long time, you literally have to start with adding it in, you know, at one meal at a time, at putting those carbohydrates back in. Maybe once a week, you would just have a sweet potato at dinner and then you would, you know, go up to two nights a week. You really do have to work on that slowly. Now this could, this applies to all diets out there. Your body loves homeostasis. It's always going to adjust to what you're doing. Right. So that's why diets work so great, usually in the beginning and then they stop working. So it's not just low carb diets, we're just seeing it more now with the low carb diets, I think it's more extreme. So the trick is, is to constantly have your body guessing what you're doing. So you want to heal that metabolism. If you've come so far the other way, you want to slowly add in the carbohydrates couple times a week so you can start to rev up that metabolism again and then you can have that balance, if you haven't been doing that and you're just following a clean, healthy diet, you want to do the, the calorie cycling. It's calorie cycling, it's food variation. It's. You can even eat to your cycle. I tell a lot of women, like, just listen to your body and when you, where you are in the month, because that's going to. I can fast, no problem. When I get my period, I could fast every day till 2 o' clock if I really wanted to. When I'm a week before my period, forget it, not going to happen. I want to eat carbohydrates. That's when I'm eating more of the potato, more sweet potato, more fruits. I'm not into protein as much like you can really listen. And that just automatically then gives you the diet variation so that your body can't get used to what you're doing. So you take advantage of calorie restriction, the weight loss that comes with calorie restriction, through fasting through lower carb, lower calorie diets. Some people can go low fat and it works just as well as low carb.

I will tell you, I used to work out of the Pritikin center way back when as a personal trainer. And the same thing we see with low carb over time happened with low fat. It's the exact same thing. You would see people come in the first month, it was amazing. And then all of a sudden their blood sugar shot up, their triglycerides shot. It was like, you know. Yeah, so.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it just makes sense when you really start to think about how would we have eaten as hunter gatherers.

Right.

If we're going to go back to that, then how would we. We would have fasted and we would have feasted. We would have come across like a crop of strawberries or a bunch of mangoes and potato, you know, digging up the trees. During the summer, Winter.

Yeah, during the summer.

In the winter you would eat more protein, more animal fats, things like that. Maybe not as much. So naturally we weren't in ketosis all year round. Ketosis, being able to burn ketones was a survival mechanism that the body had to have in order to survive in case there wasn't a lot of food around. But preferentially we want the sugar, we want the carbohydrates, so finding that balance and it works so well. So when I say cycling, I mean some days you'll be down to the 500 calories. You know, maybe just have lunch and dinner and fast until lunch one day and then the next day eat breakfast, lunch, dinner with some carbohydrates in it and basically be shifting your body and each person is going to look different. If you're insulin resistant, you may need to fast more and have less of those higher carb days, you know, and adjust as your body goes along. If you've got adrenal issues, you don't want to be fasting all the time because you're going to lose your more of the cortisol. It's going to be hard on the adrenal system as well as your thyroid. Your thyroid and adrenals love sugar, period.

So we have a quiz that you're giving everybody that's going to help them figure out what they should be eating. Yes, this.

Tell me about the Hormone quiz with the Hormone Quiz is a really comprehensive hormone quiz that will help you identify what hormones could be impacting your weight. And then in that email funnel you're going to get my two week hormone and metabolic reboot meal plan, which is exactly what we've talked about today. And this is a carb cycling, calorie cycling meal plan that's low inflammatory. It's a paleo based, keto based meal plan.

Cool.

So I'm going to put that at jjvirgin.com forward/volley because that's really what we've been talking about is how to create variations in your diet so your body doesn't adapt and get stuck. So we'll put that there. I super appreciate that and I appreciate your time today too. And I'm very excited about everything you've been talking about.

It's really.

I've been in the weight loss field now for 30 years and I've always had clients teaching me. And this is where I've come to is like this exact same thing. I think we're all going, okay. It is just ridiculous. But again, this is why I want to get this information out because I still see people out there talking. In fact, I was in the Bahamas with one of my best friends, Dave Asprey, and we were sitting at a table with someone. I go, do you not know who you're sitting with? Because the person was saying, yeah, it's just calories in, calories out. And I thought, you know, Dave and I are looking over going. I was like, wow. I think we were just like, I don't even know what to say with this, but it's still out there. And I thought, he has no idea who he's sitting next to. It's pretty funny. Anyway, so I'm going to put all that again, grab that quiz that will get you those meal plans. That sounds amazing. And that's jjburgeon.com variety. Thank you so much for gifting all of that to everyone listening and thank you so much for taking time to begin. I super appreciate it.

Thanks, jj.

All right, now after the break, I'm going to give you some top takeaways to put into immediate action. So stay with me.

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Ray Ban meta glasses available at Ray Ban stores and other authorized retailers.

Alrighty.

Welcome back.

So this is where I give you your, your marching orders. And here's the thing. So you are the founder and CEO of your healthcare.

You are like, you know your body best, right?

So what's really important is to really start to understand what first of all, what feeling good really feels like. That's the first part. And then what is your normal so that if things shift for you, you can understand. Because one of the things I like to do with other all of my programs and I've built all my programs to help you really go through a discovery process so that you can help identify at this time with these goals. You know, what's your what, what do you need to be doing? I believe diet should be used therapeutically to to find a result. Like with the virgin diet, we take you through that to figure out your hidden food intolerances, figuring out which foods work for you and which foods don't for sugar impact really get you to be metabolically flexible, a hybrid so you can burn fat, burn sugar and burn ketones and see really where you're best with carbohydrates. And then if you do want to cycle and keep ketogenic diet, how to do it, if you're doing intermittent fasting, etc. But again, just like what you heard today, these things are all built into cycles and then you pull in the things so that you're eating healthy on a regular basis. So what that means is you really want to get clear on what you know, what's my normal, how do I feel? So that if there's a shift in your sleep, your bowel movements, your mood, you're going to go. Huh? All right. What's going on? Did something shift in my hormones? Because those are a moving target, right? Or did something shift in my diet or my environment? Maybe I exposed to mold, you know, maybe got a new stressor. So all these things are critical. Now. I love the quiz, so I'm going to say go grab that quiz from karen@jjvirgin.com Variety to help you on that self identification process.

Okay, one more quick ask.

If you've not yet done it, rate and review. It helps us a ton. It's a big shout out for all the team. And then I can shout you out too on the next show. So make sure you put your name in there as well. All right, See you next time. Bye.

Foreigners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I check all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshould I read next podcast.com to find out more.