The #1, Research-Backed Habit for Fat Loss After 35 (Body Recomposition for Women)

0:11 Welcome back to the body recomposition revolution. This is Robin and today we are talking about why food tracking is the missing piece for your fat loss. Why food tracking is a necessity if you are trying to drop fat as a woman over 35 and is not just me saying that through my own personal experience and the experience of my clients. It is a lot of different research studies that cite daily recordings of your food or food tracking. Same thing lead to roughly double the weight loss. And these studies are public.

0:46 There's one from Harvard that I was recently reading and I had posted on my Instagram along with a multitude of others. There's a huge one by the Weight Management Study, which I cite frequently in this podcast, where nearly 1700 people who kept daily food records, they all lost about twice as much weight as the people who did not keep a food diary. That is a 200% difference that is tied solely to food tracking. So let that sink in. There was a group of almost 2000 people, the people who food tracked daily.

1:22 They lost two times as much weight as those who didn't. And it's not the tool. It's not the tool you are using to track your food. Maybe you're writing in a notebook or using an app, what have you. It's not the tool. That does not matter. It is the act of tracking your food. It creates awareness. Another word for that is feedback. You are having active feedback and awareness of what you're putting into your body. So it is the ACT. It is not the tool you use to track your food. So if you are eating pretty well and you're working out consistently and you're still not dropping fat, this episode is for you.

2:02 Because what is actually missing is not your discipline. It's the feedback. It's the awareness. And without that feedback, without the awareness of what you are putting into your body, fat loss stalls. It plateaus, especially after 35. Why? Because your hormones start changing after 35. I have experienced that first hand. Your hormones are the messengers that are fluctuating throughout your body at all times during the day. They determine what happens when you eat to everything that goes into your body.

2:32 They they say, are we going to store it here? Are we going to use it there? What are we doing with this? Those messengers, your hormones, they change after 35. And because of that, you do have to be more keenly aware of what you are putting into your body. And what is so great about body recomposition is it is not about eating less for most women. It's about sending the right signals to your body. And signals require feedback. They require awareness. Now, throughout this episode, I'm going to be citing some things from the book Atomic Habits.

3:10 I love that book. It was a COVID read of mine. It really had an impact on my life, my lifestyle. It still does to this day, 5-6 years later. And in that book, James Clear explains that habits do not change through motivation. Motivation does not matter. Remember that your motivation does not matter. Your habits change through feedback. When we can see what's happening, When we see what we're eating, our brain naturally adjusts. That's why food tracking works for fat loss. It just does because it control.

3:42 It's not that it controls you, it gives your body clear signals. Even on the days that I am just haphazardly just putting food into my my tracker and I don't really have my food prepped for the day and I'm not really being proactive about what I'm going to eat, when I start tracking it, I kind of naturally adjust. Like this morning I had two protein balls that were pretty calorically dense. I put those into my app and I was like, whoa, I'm already about 300 calories in and I've only been awake for 14 seconds.

4:13 I am going to have to make a little bit of a smaller breakfast this morning. I wouldn't have that awareness if I did not put that into my app. I wouldn't even be thinking about it. And I have been tracking food for 15 years. It's all about just having that awareness and how it naturally changes our actions throughout the entirety of the day. And I would say that the core problem for women that I hear on repeat is I eat clean, I don't snack hard, I work out constantly. I don't understand why I'm not dropping fat.

4:43 You don't so much hear that for women who are below 35 because our bodies just operate differently. As I mentioned earlier in the episode, you hear that for women after age 35 because our energy needs are different. Our muscle is naturally decreasing 1% each year after 35 and our muscle is harder for us to maintain. Our stress tolerance is lower, the margin for error is so much smaller. That's why earlier in your life you could just hop on a treadmill for an hour a day and be down 5 lbs by the end of the week.

5:16 That is not how it works for women after age 35. This is why tracking is imperative for us because we have to know how much protein are we eating? We have to know what calories are we consuming? Are we in a real deficit? We have to have that awareness because without enough protein, we will have muscle loss. Without enough calories, we will have a metabolic downshift. Your metabolism will slow if you're not eating enough. If you have way too many calories, you're not going to drop fat. That's impossible.

5:49 Without that awareness, that fat storage increases even when our intake doesn't feel high. We have to have it in writing. We have to be able to see it. So in the book Atomic Habits, behavior change does not come from motivation, as I said, it comes from systems. And one of the most powerful systems is feedback. And you might be thinking what exactly is feedback? What does that mean? And why do I need to have that to drop fat? Imagine this, you go about your day as normal. You are eating intuitively and it just kind of feels like you had a good day nutritionally.

6:31 You had a salad, you had some chicken. You went to Starbucks and you did not order your Cafe Whatever Frappuccino. You ordered a black coffee. You had a great day nutritionally. You didn't track it though. So that continues on day by day. And you're wondering, why am I not dropping fat? I am working out all the time. Well, there could be two different scenarios there. You're not getting enough protein, you are eating too little, or you're eating too much. How are you supposed to know? You don't have feedback.

7:02 You don't have data to guide your choices. Now start that day over. You begin tracking your food throughout the day. You don't miss a beat. At the end of the day, you realize, whoa ho ho. I was 60g short of what is recommended for me to maintain my muscle. 60 grams and how is it possible that I ate 90 grams of fat? That's 40 over what I'm supposed to be eating. You would not have that awareness if you did not track your food. And that's a moment that I have often and I have been tracking on and off for 15 years.

7:36 I consistently rely on the feedback that my tracking app provides so that I can guide my choices in the future. If I did not track my food, I would really not know where my deficit is. I wouldn't know if I'm eating too little protein or too much food in general, or too much fat. I wouldn't know. I would have no feedback. And so tracking your food is empowering. Tracking your food is giving you awareness. It is giving you knowledge. And when you have knowledge, that is power. You are empowered to make better choices with your nutrition.

8:10 You can hone in to shape your body exactly how you want with the proper macro formulation. That's what I always tell my ladies, yes. Is it a pain in the butt to track your food? Of course, it's horrible. If that's too much, we can scale it back, which I will mention a little bit further in the episode. So tracking works because it removes the guesswork, not because it forces you to restrict. And I want to address the mental block that women tend to have because what tracking used to mean was making sure you were in a really unhealthy caloric deficit, making sure you were eating no carbs.

8:46 So when you're in a really unhealthy caloric deficit and you're eating no carbs, you can expect you're going to feel like crap. So why would you want to track? That is not something you should be excited about, but that is diet culture and that is in the past. Now we have enough research that is widely spread to understand that's not healthy. That's not how we body recomposition. That is not going to build muscle. That is not going to help us drop fat. It's not going to get us stronger. It's not going to increase our lean muscle mass.

9:16 None of that couldn't can coexist with the way diet culture used to be. Diet culture, as you know, used to be starve yourself. It was South Beach 0 Carb, it was keto, it was Weight Watchers. It was just eating less and less and less and doing more and more and more. And when you combine those two, especially for women, that results in skinny fat, health problems, metabolic disorders, a lack of muscle. It's not good. And not just physically. You will have a whole host of unseen health problems when you follow diet culture and how it used to be.

9:53 And that is my mission in life as I take these women who have been a product of that, myself included, and I help them reframe their mind, mind to accept science. Science says carbs are good, they fuel our muscles. Science says protein is good, it builds our muscles. Science says lifting, heavy lifting and hypertrophy that builds our muscles. That is what we need to drop fat and get the toned look they all aspire to have. And it's a huge mental block. It's a hurdle. It's something we have to actively squish every single day.

10:28 Because when you think about it, women's food intake and their physical activity, whatever end of the spectrum either of those things fall on, is a very emotionally loaded topic. It really is. I don't know how men feel about that. I'm, I'm not a man and I don't primarily work with men, but for women, it always has been. And I hope that in the future that that narrative will change. And a big part of my mission, I would say, is to help women separate their emotions from data. You want to take data for what it is, which is just feedback, and use that feedback to guide your decisions.

11:08 Is it, is it really horrible to jump on the scale in the morning when you're first getting started? Yes. But the more you do that, the more comfortable you become stepping on that scale every single morning, putting that number into your app or into a notebook, The more you learn to separate your emotions from the data because we use that data to guide our decisions. And when you are stepping on the scale every single morning and you see that number change and you can look back at the graphs that whatever app you use provides, you can see when you have off weekends, you can see that, oh, maybe I need to put myself into a tiny bit steeper of a deficit or, hmm, I'm dropping weight really fast.

11:53 I don't want to lose muscle. I think I'm going to increase my daily caloric intake by a couple, 100, what have you. When you put that number into the app and you separate that number from your sense of mental well-being, you can use that data to guide your decisions. And it is a powerful tool. Data is an incredibly powerful tool. I still to this day struggle a bit to get on the scale when I know I've had an off couple weeks, you know, I will get on there and I'm not happy sometimes. But I know that that is just a reflection of some of the nutritional choices that I had been making.

12:32 And when I look back at the graphs that my app gives me, I use that to guide my decisions. I view it as data. It's feedback and now I am aware, I have the awareness that, hey, I've been in a build phase for a month now. I think I'm going to gradually taper that back and go into more of a maintenance phase because now my body weight is getting into the upper end of my what I'm comfortable with range. Because I have a range that I know from years of data collection where I can keep my body weight within that range and know that on one end I have enough caloric intake to build muscle, In the middle I have enough caloric intake to at least maintain and build a bit, and if I go to the left, I know I'm going to be dropping fat.

13:20 I have that range because of the years of feedback I've accumulated through data collection to getting on the scale when I don't want to and taking that number and putting it into the app and looking through it and letting it guide my decisions going forward. That is feedback, that is knowledge, and that is power that translates into making real, solid choices that will only bring you closer to your goals. Without having that awareness, without having that feedback, without having that data, how are you supposed to know what direction to take so that you can achieve your goals?

13:55 You can't. You need it. It's a necessity. And you don't have to use tracking for the rest of your life. You can just use it as a temporary tool for data collection. You can use it as a tool to learn. You can use it as a tool to develop a much higher understanding of your body and what it does when it's given certain nutrients. It doesn't need to be forever. They can just be for now. And is it going to be hard? Yes. But you can do hard things. I will always remember when I was living one of my roommates after college her parents came over to help with something.

14:31 Who knows? I've actually known her since I was born. I grew up next to her. Her dad was standing there and I was talking about how my student teaching placement was 40 minutes away from our apartment. And that's just kind of where I wound up. I really didn't have a say in it. It was just the way it was. And at that point, I was not used to driving 40 minutes at 7. AMI was not such an early riser as I am now, and I was dreading it. I had no idea how I was going to do it. And I was voicing that to her dad.

15:04 And I will always remember what he said because it sticks with me and it's so simple. But he said you can do anything for a year. And he said it was such confidence. He said it was such certainty. And I knew he was right. I knew that I could do anything for a year. I can do that for a year. And every time I take on a challenge or start something that is difficult, I actually go back to that moment in the hallway where he says you can do anything for a year. And I tell myself, I can do this. I can do anything for a year.

15:35 Don't sell yourself short. You, you can do anything for a year, OK? You can track your food for three months. But I tell you what, if you do it for a year, you will be a new person inside and out by the end of that year. I promise you. Now, if you refuse to track your food because you've done it before and to you, it's just it's not happening at this moment. It's too much for you to take on. You don't care about my motivational sentence of you can do anything for a year. You don't want to do that thing for a year.

16:06 There are options for you. There are. You don't have to cannonball into the tracking pool. You can just dip your toe in for a bit and see if you like it, see if it's something that you might be able to dabble with more in depth in the future. But there are options. There's 3/3 that I have current clients doing at this moment. Number one, track your protein only. So for my clients, when they come on board with me, I do a custom macro formulation and I give them the a series of quizzes, a carb tolerance quiz, a macro typing quiz, and just kind of like a general lifestyle quiz.

16:39 And we use those 3 quizzes to develop this macro formulation. And some women have a high carb carb tolerance, some women have a medium low, what have you. But I will give them the exact amount of protein in grams, the exact amount of carbs in grams, and fat in grams, including caloric intake that they need to shoot for on a daily basis to achieve their aesthetic, their physical, their health goals. And sometimes that's just too much. It's too much to take on. So I give them this first option, which is protein tracking only.

17:11 You're going to track your food, but you're just going to track your protein. You don't need to worry about the carbs and the fat and the calories. Just track your protein. You're going to shoot for 30 to 40 grams per meal. If that's something you're interested in, shoot for that amount, 30 to 40 grams of protein per meal if you're a woman. It's just a very broad strokes number, but it will do. It will do do in terms of muscle preservation, not promising you any fat loss on that because you will most likely not be in a deficit, but that will preserve your muscle.

17:42 Option number two, time bound tracking. You're going to track everything for just 7 to 14 days, 7 to 14 days. Do it for two weeks. If it is completely unfathomable to continue on, you can stop. But at 14 days, if you are not motivated beyond belief to continue going forth because you will see physical changes, OK, after 14 days you will, albeit mild, maybe you will see some and that in and of itself should motivate you to continue going forward. And if not, hey, you did it. Check. You can go down to the protein tracking only if tracking everything is too much.

18:18 So option one protein tracking only. Option two, time bound tracking. So you know, two weeks of tracking and your final option, which this would definitely prepare you to be a full blown tracker because a lot of it is just eating consistently the same things on repeat. So option #3 just eat your same meals during the week. You're going to prep your food and you're going to eat them on repeat. OK, same meals during the week. So when you have fewer variables, you get a clearer signal. And if that's something, I've done that with one of my clients and we just kind of sat down and listed out some food she was willing to try or that she liked, and she prepped those meals for the week.

18:57 And when she was comfortable with that, we moved into going the protein counting only. And then after that, she was a full blown tracker. Now, none of these three options will fully replace the efficacy of tracking everything, but they will bridge the gap. They will prepare you mentally and they are the shallow end of the pool. You're going to get a temperature for the pool. You're going to dip your toe into the shallow end, and you will be prepared to go in a little bit deeper after you sit there for a while.

19:26 Now, I have to make this clear distinction before I tie off this episode, but there is a difference between weight loss and recomposition. There is a clear, clear difference and why tracking matters so much for both of these, but it is so crucial for body recomposition is because recomposition is tissue focused. It means that we are literally changing the composition of your body. When we are focusing on body recomposition, our goal is to drop fat, eliminate the fat in your body, and build the muscle.

20:05 We want to do those two things simultaneously because as the fat melts away and as we continue to build your lean muscle mass, your body will completely. Transform. It will look like something you only imagined in your dreams. You could look like because it will be that toned look you've always wanted to have. That's recomposition. Weight loss is scale focused. Weight loss is when you are only learning about being in a caloric deficit and you will drop weight. You will. I was just talking to a client on the phone about this this morning.

20:40 You will drop weight while being in a caloric deficit, and you need to be in a deficit for both recomposition and weight loss. But the difference with weight loss is that that's the sole thing you're focusing on is eating less than you need to maintain your current weight. And when we're not, when we're not thinking about protein and carbs and fats, when we're only thinking about calories, what happens is as we drop weight, a lot of that comes from the muscle we already have, which is not what we want to do.

21:10 We do not want to give up the most expensive tissue in our body. We want to hold on to that. We want to build that with weight loss. You're giving that up. You're also giving up the fat, but you're giving up your lean muscle mass. And as you become weaker and your muscles go away along with the fat, yes, that is going to be reflected on the scale. You will become smaller and lighter, which is great. That's, that's great if you have a lot of weight to lose, but ideally every woman I work with would be a recomposition client.

21:43 And why is that feedback, that data a non negotiable for recomposition? Well, because muscle requires adequate fuel. It requires enough protein. Fat loss requires precision. We need to dial in what your BMR is, what your TDE is. We need to dial in what percent of a deficit we're going to go into to control the rate of fat loss. And with the only way we can do those two things is by tracking your food consistently. In closing, if fat loss has felt super confusing and completely discouraging and you have no idea what you're doing wrong, this is your missing piece.

22:27 You need to track your food. It really is. It is the feedback you need to guide your decisions. It is. And you have this tool at your finger to free, free tracking apps. I love macros first. That's what I've been using for years and years. I also have my own personal A that a lot of my clients track their food with. Great. You have all these as at your disposal. All you have to do is scan your food, put it into the app, make it a habit, do it on repeat every single day. Back when I was tracking my food in college, we didn't have apps, we didn't have smartphones.

22:59 While I was pretty stubborn, I wouldn't get one for a bit, but I would use pen and paper in a packet of printed foods. That was an alliteration, a packet of printed foods that I ate all the time and just you, you don't do the math was horrible. You guys have apps that you can use. Why not use them? And this is the best part about women. They they innately just work hard. They work hard in everything they do. So when they are given a set of instructions from me or another coach as to what they need to do to get where they want to go, they do it.

23:35 You just have to start. You just have to start. So you might be thinking, where do you start? Well, you can go online and find a free macro calculator that will give you a, they're kind of all over the place, but they'll do for now. That will give you exactly how many calories you need to eat protein, carbs, fats. And you will take that formula, your protein, carbs and fats and pump it into whatever app you want to use and you'll just track your food. There is My Fitness Pal, there's macros first.

24:06 You just go on there and in your App Store and type in food tracking and even the apps have some sort of calculator that will help you determine what numbers to put in there. I also do custom macro formulations. I mentioned that earlier. I have a series of three quizzes I use to give you a really precise formula that will help you just get to your goal more efficiently. As I said previously, some of my women are they can do a high carb intake, some are moderate, some are low, some have thyroid disorders.

24:35 I take all that into consideration when I do your macro formulation. And if that's something you're interested in, you can always e-mail me that is RAC Fitness, RAC Fitness MN like [email protected] or you can find me an instant message me there That is RAC Fitness under score. My friend is just giving me a hard time the other day because I think I called it an under dash, but under score rack fitness under score on Instagram. And with that, you will get a really detailed PDF, two page PDF indicating how you need to eat, when you need to eat, what you need to eat, why you need to eat it.

25:15 I've had a lot of really fun interactions with women from all around the world, honestly, as we kind of figure out their macros together. And Full disclosure, it usually takes me about 72 hours. There's, there's a lot of back and forth with me and a lot of time making your PDF extra cute and personalized. So if you don't want to do that, please empower yourself, Go online, find a tool. They're free. Use them because again, knowledge is power. That feedback, that data, it will give you the knowledge you need to make those changes that you want to change.

25:48 So ladies, thank you so much for listening. And if you have any questions, again, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on Instagram or e-mail. And I have to say, I have so enjoyed interacting with you. You know, I get comments in my e-mail, just comments, things that they like. Someone had said, I bought this book you recommended, it was so great. Or another person said, wow, you really helped me figure out how much protein I should be eating. And I've seen huge changes over the last few that I have goosebumps even saying it as my mission.

26:20 I want women to be powerful and strong because they need to be. They need to be for every single person that surrounds you in your life. So again ladies, thank you for listening and you will hear from me next week.