The Truth About Calories
& Weight Loss
The Truth About Calories and Weight Loss
Why is losing weight so hard?
Isn't it just a matter of eat less, burn more, and the scale will start moving, or are we missing something here?
Every major diet on the market is based on tracking and restricting calories in some way. Every diet you've probably tried has involved some version of calorie control through packaged food, tracking on an app, counting points, only eating certain foods in certain proportions etc. You know the drill. You've been there, done that, probably multiple times!
The calories in/calories out diet model is THE accepted model for weight loss, you'll hear it from your doctor, dietician, trainer, the girl on insta, reality tv weight loss shows, EVERYWHERE! It's taught in the schools and programs that train all those professionals, I was even taught this model early on.
So the question becomes - if being on a "calorie deficit" diet was THE answer to losing weight, why are 80% of Americans overweight or obese DESPITE 33 million of them being on a calorie restriction diet at any given time?
Clearly there's more to the problem of weight loss and weight gain than a simple calories in/calories out model. Everybody has that friend who eats whatever she wants, and twice as much as you, but doesn't gain a pound. Meanwhile you eat half as much as she does, but if you so much as smell a cookie your thighs get bigger. Clearly it's NOT the calories. Her body is obviously functioning better than yours. And spoiler alert - she didn't get her body to function optimally by dieting harder or starving herself more, like you're probably doing on that diet.
In this episode we're going to discuss:
- what calories ARE, where the concept of calorie and the 1200 calorie diet came from
- why counting calories, cutting or adding calories is NOT the answer for long term weight loss
- the other factors that are actually controlling how your body absorbs, regulates, and utilizes the calories
- how your calorie restrictive diet have destroyed your metabolism and you mindset
- what the body systems are that ACTUALLY matter for long term weight loss like gut health, liver health, and hormonal balance - and how to heal them
- how to shift your mindset from short term diet mentality to long term health and lasting weight loss
If you want to get BEYOND yo yo dieting, and never diet again, you have to change your strategy. That strategy is what I teach in the 12 Weeks to Weight Loss and Wellness Program. Enrollment is open right now and we start April 27. Click the link in these show notes to check it out and get registered!
XOXO
Tara
Full transcription available at the bottom of this post
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Show Notes:
STARTING APRIL 27!!!! Weight Loss & Wellness Coaching Program!!!!!
If you’re OVER IT, tired of diets not working, tired of the lose weight, gain weight yo you, tired of taking care of everyone else but letting yourself go, check this out.
You’ll learn to :
- Properly set goals so you'll actually stick to them and succeed
- Retrain your mind for success and food freedom
- Overcome emotional eating for good
- Create new, healthy, lasting habits for long term success, and remove habits that no longer serve you
- Use food as fuel, how to determine what foods are right for you, and how food works in your body
- Simple ways to incorporate movement and exercise into your busy life
Take control of your mind, your body, and your life!
Click the link to check it out, and if you're ready, get signed up. If you still have questions, schedule a free coaching call to see if working together is right for you!
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Full Transcript:
Count those calories, track your points, you can't lose weight unless you're in a caloric deficit, exercise to burn more calories. You have all heard this advice and tried to live by it. It's the predominant story in weight loss today, and almost every single diet you've tried is some form of calorie restriction. But if counting calories worked for long term weight loss, wouldn't we all just be at our ideal weight and stay there? I mean, it's not that complex a concept. So why doesn't it seem to work long term? Why do we keep gaining weight after our diet and have to hop back on a diet again, the problem with counting calories for weight loss is precisely that it is too simplistic. Today, I'm going to break down the calorie myth. And we're going to get to the bottom of what actually matters for long term fat loss.
Let's go.
Before we get going, I want to read you the review of the week from iTunes. This comes from uplifted 1111 she says real talk for real ladies. Wow, Tara breaks down the hard pieces of life in a real raw and relatable way. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. Keep it coming, Sis, I intend to thank you so much for that review. I love getting feedback on that iTunes podcast. If you haven't left a review yet, hop over to iTunes do it really fast. That helps me out a ton. And I just so so appreciate you taking a little time to do that.
And I also want to remind you really quickly that starting April 27 so from air date of this you got about 11 days to go to Tara Faulmann comm check out the 12 weeks to weight loss and wellness program, you are not going to want to miss this. This program is not a calorie counting port program. It is not a diet plan. It is a life plan. We're going to talk about how to properly set goals. We're going to retrain your mind for success and food freedom. We're going to overcome emotional eating and really give you the tools to overcome that for good. We're going to create healthy, lasting habits. We're going to understand how our body works and how to heal it so that we can lose weight. Keep it off, be healthy for good. So if that sounds good to you, you're going to want to head to Tara faulmann.com. Check it out, read all the things ask all the questions. schedule a time with me to talk if you want to if you have extra questions, and then get yourself registered because we start April 22, seven, April 27. It's a Tuesday night. All right. I'm so excited for that program. It's gonna be awesome.
So calorie counting. The idea of calorie restriction to lose weight is what you're going to hear from your doctor, your registered dietician, your trainer on social media, that girl on Instagram, reality television, the trainer's on those shows, like you're gonna hear this concept everywhere. You already have heard this concept everywhere. Almost every date you've ever been on is a calorie restriction diet of some sort. All of these people were taught the same things in their education. And they were taught that calories in calories out formula. It's perpetuated by the US Surgeon General of the United States, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics nutrition textbooks. I was taught it in my undergrad education, this idea of calories in versus calories out as the way to lose weight. It's like the accepted model and I am here to tell you, the model is broken. And there are plenty of ways to fix it. But I need you to start retraining your brain having a new perspective on the way that you look at weight loss, and if you do that, you will see that simply counting calories is not going to be useful to you.
So when you sign up for things like My Fitness Pal and Weight Watchers and Nutrisystem, etc, etc, the list goes on and on. For infinity. They're all calorie restriction plans. The obvious and glaring problem with calorie restriction plans is that inevitably, your weight loss is going to slow, you're going to reach that plateau. And your only option then, is to keep cutting calories, right? If the diet stops working, you have to diet harder, starve yourself harder. This really is setting you up for failure. And honestly, it's totally fucking with your head. Like the reason that we are all in such as this bad position with our relationship with food is because of all these diets, all of these diets are just telling us that we're the problem. We're not dieting hard enough. It's totally backwards. It's clearly not working. Because what we've ended up with is a population that has rampant type two diabetes, 80% of Americans are overweight or obese, people are totally defeated mentally, because we just feel like we must be doing it wrong. Clearly, if this model worked, we'd all be healthy and wonderful, we are not. So to me, it says this widely accepted model is broken.
The reason that you are told and the reason you keep focusing on counting calories, or points or tracking, whatever, however you're doing it, you're counting calories. The reason you keep doing it, the reason you're told it will work is because in the short term, it does work, right, a short term calorie deficit will cause weight loss in most people. The problem is the damage that you're doing during that short term calorie deficit is causing longer term problems where you're going to gain the weight back and you're gonna have to get on the diet again, you're going to have to keep going through this cycle. You know, this is true, because you've already done this in your life, right? You've done this yo yo, the term yo yo dieting is a thing because it's what everyone ends up having to do. Why? Because counting calories didn't work. It only worked for a short time, not a long time.
And I hope that I in these last 12 episodes have explained to you guys that there is a huge difference between a short term satisfaction, weight loss and a long term keeping the weight off. It's a very different strategy. It's a very different approach. Long term weight loss and health is a different approach. Becoming healthier is the only way that you keep weight off long term, period, end of story, you have to get your body functioning properly. If the only thing you're focusing on is calories, then you are not paying any attention to how your body is actually functioning. Therefore, in the long term, you gain all the way back, you don't make the progress that you want to make.
I want to have a talk about your goals too, because your goals matter. If your goal is to achieve 10% body fat and get on a stage in a physique competition, you're gonna have to count macros and calories, you're gonna have to manipulate your body in some very specific and honestly kind of unnatural ways to achieve that physique result. So there is a place for counting calories and macros. But for me, it's really only if you have that very specific body type in mind, most of you are not that most of you want to have a more healthy and appropriate and sustainable body composition and bodyweight, you want to lose weight to look cuter in your shorts, not so much to get a six pack, you want to live longer not get type two diabetes or other chronic diseases, you want to have more energy be able to run around, you want to like working out feel good when you exercise, feel strong, feel vibrant, that's you there's much more effective ways to get that result than counting calories and or counting macros. So I just want you to keep in mind what your actual goals are. Because that's how you determine what your strategy is there is a very small part of the population who are going to have very specific physique goals, and they are the ones who are going to employ the counting strategies. Everyone else doesn't need to do it.
And I want to be clear, it's not that calorie counting is stupid, or it doesn't exist or it's not real. It's just that to me, it's an unnatural approach to an unsustainable result.
So for the goals of the majority of the people, it's just not the right thing. approach. And you already know that why this doesn't work. You've seen this in action in real life. So I know that you have that one friend, that one friend who probably eats twice as much as you that one friend who you go to Chipotlei, and she's like, double guac, double chicken, like, give me extra everything, she will pound that down like no big deal. And she is skinny and fit like she doesn't even have to try. And you simply walk by a donut shop and smell doughnuts and your ass gets bigger. Like, you know, these people exist, you know, this is true, you have that friend, she eats twice as much as you and never put on a pound. Why is that? Clearly it has nothing to do with calories. She's eating twice as many calories as you are. It has something to do with how her body is functioning versus how your body is functioning. Her body is probably functioning optimally, your body is probably not, you know, face value just from your own personal experience in your life, that the idea of counting calories is flawed, because you know that person.
So I think we should talk about like, what is it calorie? How did this concept becomes so prolific in this country. A calorie is simply a unit of measurement. It's measuring the available energy in food. More specifically, it is the energy required to heat one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. And it's measured by bomb colorimetry. So that's just a fancy instrument that they use. Okay, so it's the potential energy in food is basically what they're saying. So I think calories are more useful if we talk about, energy in and energy out and energy use versus calories in calories out, the word energy is more appropriate of a word to use than calorie, but that's what they mean. So a calorie, let's say in one gram of fat and protein and carbs, it was first measured in the late 1800s. Now, to me, this is like a red flag city, we're still using science and technology and numbers based on measurements that were taken in the late 1800s. It hasn't changed since then. That is highly problematic.
So late 1800s. At that time, when they first were developing the science, they found that even within the same food, so for example, apples from the same tree picked at the same time, the amount of calories that were in those apples were highly variable. So it wasn't even close to exact science. And even though the US government knew that the calorie counts were imprecise. They just decided we're just take some averages, we'll generalize this, and we'll just use it. They calculated all these calorie averages in the 1890s. They call it the Atwater system. And those averages that they calculated in the 1890s are still the calorie counts in use today. I mean, come on you guys. Like To me, the whole idea then is just based on like crap science, like that's not even accurate. So the bottom line is that calorie counts are averages and the actual calories of what you're actually consuming, might be significantly higher or significantly lower than what it says on the label. And think of this, think of how many more processed foods there are now than in the 1890s. The things that we are eating today wouldn't even be considered food in the 1890s. So how then could I make the assumption that the calorie count would be anywhere near accurate, most of the stuff we eat today that most people eat didn't even exist back then. So I just want you to kind of really understand that using calories and macros because macros are based on the same calorie math is imprecise and should not be taken as dogma or religion. Just like your weight on the scale. It's one tiny metric, among a ton of other metrics that you need to consider.
Interestingly, to the concept of counting calories, was developed in 1918. Specifically, the concept of the 1200 calorie diet. Now you have seen this ever rewear there are literally still books being written about the 1200 calorie diet somehow 1200 calorie diet became the ideal number of calories when you make up My Fitness Pal account. your calorie automatically defaults to 1200 calories. That 1200 calories is not based on anything scientific. Okay? It's based on a book from 1918, which was the first Diet book. Also, again, based on the Atwater calorie system. I just want to paint a picture for you and 18. In 1918, what was happening, we're getting into the roaring 20s. And the body type that society loved in the roaring 20s was that super rail, thin flapper look. So the woman who wrote this diet book was trying to help other women look like that super rail, thin flapper. Most women are not built like that. That is an unnatural body type for most women. So she developed this 1200 calorie diet, so that you can unnaturally force yourself into that body type.
So I just again, I want to paint this picture for you that the whole idea of this is based on just these unnatural ideas of what we should look like. Also, the woman who wrote that book, her philosophy was that enduring hunger pain was a form of noble self control. That idea is so fucked up. It's not even. Okay, so she's probably the godmother of modern eating disorders. Congratulations to you. Because telling women that constantly being in a state of hunger is the most noble thing they could do. Good. Lord, what have you done? Well, here's what you've done. 80 80% of Americans are overweight or obese. Congratulations. I do want you to take a second and understand that some of these ideas that you have, that you have ingrained in yourself about how you suck, and you can't stick to a diet, and why can't you? Why doesn't it just work for you? It's not your fault. These terrible ideas were developed decades ago, and they have just permeated society permeated your brain, I want you to know you have more control. And this is not the way.
So I want to talk about some of the biggest problems with the idea of using calorie counting as your method to weight loss. And the problem is that there are so many variables in your body actually determine what happens to those calories. Once they enter your body. It is highly variable from person to person, how many calories you're actually absorbing and using. That's why you've got super skinny friend who eats a ton and overweight friend who can't who doesn't eat anything all day and still gains weight. Our bodies are entirely variable. So I want to talk about those ways that we are variable, those ways that we're determining how our body uses calories. Because I think those are far more important than how many calories we're actually bringing in how our body actually is working, is what's going to determine our long term health and weight loss.
So the first three things I want to talk about are really the three major players in your metabolism, and in how your body is functioning, how it's using calories, how it's absorbing calories, and nutrients. And those three things I'm talking about together because they all kind of work in concert with each other. That is your gut, your liver and your hormones. And I could add a fourth in there, your hypothalamus in your brain also is part of controlling all of those things as well. And they all work together. So healing one will help the others healing all three, we'll help all three. The biggest thing that goes wrong is just this state of chronic inflammation that so much of us, so many of us are in poor gut health leads to chronic inflammation because of leaky gut. So if you listen to the gut health episodes, we talked about how leaky gut means you have like kind of holes in the lining of your gut and things from your intestines are leaking into your body that shouldn't be that causes an immune response, which causes widespread inflammation. So that is problematic that widespread inflammation is now affecting your brain. It's affecting your heart. It's affecting your liver, it's affecting your hormones. It's affecting everything. But specifically, I want to talk about how that poor gut health is affecting the communication to your brain. So your gut microbiome is literally what makes the call on how many calories are absorbed in your body. So your microbes are what is determining that and your microbes. are constantly talking to your brain through your vagus nerve. And when you have gut dysbiosis, so your microbiome is off to many good bad microbes, not enough good microbes, leaky gut inflammation that is impeding the communication between your gut and your brain. So there's not good communication there. If you remember, in the gut health episode, we talked about studies that were showing that fecal transplant was actually helping mice lose weight. So they were taking the basically the microbiome of a healthy, healthy weight person, putting it into an overweight mouse, and the mouse was losing weight because their microbiome had changed.
So the makeup of your microbiome is superduper. Important. And then also the status of gut health in terms of leaky gut. And gut inflammation is super important for your gut to be able to tell your brain like Yes, I'm still hungry, or no, I'm full or Yes, I got the nutrients I need, or No, I did not get you keep eating. that communication is super important. So you want to make sure that your gut is healthy. The way that we make sure that our gut is healthy, is we've got to stop consuming things that are hurting it. And I'm never going to be one to tell you like you stop this and you start this and hard and fast rules. I will say that it's a progression, right? I don't expect you in one day to go from eating McDonald's every day to eating broccoli every day. Like that's a transition I'm not going to ask you to make ever, but I am going to ask you to consider starting a progression in that direction.
So what are small ways that you can start to cut out some more of the processed foods, small ways that you can start cutting out toxins, toxins that go on your skin toxins that are in your food, like preservatives, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, artificial flavors, those are all toxins to your gut. So can you reduce the amount of diet soda you're drinking in a day that's destroying your gut. Maybe that's one small step you could start to take to heal your gut. Also removing reducing the amount of pesticides that you are exposed to. Those are all things that are easy steps that you can start taking to start healing your gut, liver inflammation and poor liver function also then results in poor hormonal regulation. Studies have shown that poor liver functioning can actually reduce your metabolic rate by hundreds of calories a day. That means your metabolism poor liver function slows down your metabolism. That's what that means. Poor liver function also impacts your thyroid, your thyroid is the major regulator of your metabolism. It's also one of your major hormone regulators. You have to heal your liver, if you want to increase your metabolism. So that means increased the amount of energy being burned every day, which is important for weight loss.
You have to think about healing your liver, how do you heal your liver? Well, it's the same way you heal your gut. Look at that. You got to stop with the processed foods. You got to reduce toxins, especially pesticide exposure, that glyphosate that is everywhere, you have to start thinking about reducing your exposure to glyphosate. There is tons and tons of research coming out linking pesticides to being one of the leading causes of non alcoholic fatty liver disease. People with non alcoholic fatty liver disease have way more tendency to store fat, slow metabolism. Everything just gets bogged down and just stops working properly. So if pesticides are one of the leading causes of non alcoholic fatty liver disease, let's get rid of the pesticides. That's why you're going to hear me pushing looking for organic and non GMO foods because they have not been exposed to those pesticides, especially that glyphosate. Really start thinking about those things and just moving in those directions so that you can help your body heal. So if I can heal my gut, I can reduce inflammation, I can heal my liver, then I'm going to improve my hormone functioning. And all of those things together are going to help me regulate my body, regulate my metabolism, regulate my weight, all good things, all that we're all things we're trying to do.
The other thing to think about is that you don't actually absorb all the calories that you eat. The cellular structure of creates wide variability and how much you actually absorb. So for example, 13 almonds has 100 calories, but you only absorb about 68% of those calories. Think about corn, a cup of corn has about 600 calories. But how many of you the next day find corn hole hurdles in the toilet? Well, obviously, you did not absorb calories from that undigested kernel of corn. In high fiber foods, for example, kale, you actually absorb about 28% more calories than the USDA calorie count is telling you that you do. So again, I'm just underscoring the idea that, just because it says this many calories does not mean that's how many calories your body is actually using from that food item.
food preparation matters. So when you cook raw food, you're actually breaking down the cell walls before it enters your body to be digested. So you're basically cooking food is basically pre digesting your food. That will increase the amount of calories your body is able to absorb. That's a good thing. I'm not suggesting you should try a raw diet. But I just want you to understand that it's just something else that is controlling how many calories your body is actually using. For example, eating a cooked sweet potato will give you almost 100 more calories than a raw sweet potato. Because the cooking process makes those calories more available. If you eat raw cane wha for example, it would pass right through you and they just did. So it would have zero caloric effect for you. But if you cooked it or grounded in flour, then you would then you would absorb those calories and nutrients within it. So how the food is prepared determines how many calories you're actually going to absorb from that food.
And all calories are not created equal. You know, this is true, because you see it in your daily life, what a food is made up of how they have vastly different effects on your body and the biological processes that control what and when and how much we eat. different foods go through different metabolic pathways, and they have direct effects on fat burning and the hormones in the brain centers that regulate appetite. So let's just go through an example. If you ate 500 calories of ice cream, it will result in a huge insulin spike, and then a huge insulin drop. And so now your blood sugar is out of balance, you're going to crave more sugar later after that huge insulin drop. It's not going to send any satiety signals to your brain. So you're not going to get any signals to your brain that say oh, I'm full you can stop eating. In fact, what you're going to get instead is your gut telling your brain Oh, well, we got some calories, but we didn't get any nutrients, we need more nutrients before we're full. So please keep eating because they need more nutrients. So you're actually going to eat more. And and scientific studies bear this out. People with unregulated blood sugar actually tend to eat more calories in a day. Conversely, eating 500 calories of broccoli will not result in an insulin spike. And it will result in feelings of satiety because because it's bulky and it's fibrous and it's telling your brain like Yeah, cool, we we feel full. And you also got a lot of nutrients. So your gut microbiome is gonna tell your brain like oh, yeah, we got nutrients, we feel really full, like yeah, you can stop eating, we're good. So all calories are definitely not created equal in terms of what it's doing in your body. 500 calories of ice cream is going to result in you over the course of a day eating more calories. Overall, then that 500 calories of broccoli is going to result in Does this make sense? So I can't think about just one meal or this calorie or that calorie I have to think about my body as a whole I have to think about my day and my life as a whole. It all affects each other.
I also want to talk about this energy in energy out concept. Different macronutrients require more energy to break down. So for example, animal protein uses about 25 to 30% of its calorie value just to digest it. This is super important for weight loss because protein number one creates more feelings of fullness feelings of satiety, it provides tons of amino acids that literally every structure in your body is made of you need amino acids, and it burns more calories just to digest it than any other macro. So in terms of macros protein is the one Most women that I talked to who are trying to lose weight are not eating enough protein. So that's gonna be a whole other episode. But I just want to throw that one out there that in terms of macronutrients protein is a winner. Compare that to carbs using about 10 to 15% of their caloric value to digest and fats using zero to 5% of their caloric value to digest. Now, this is not demonizing fats by any means, it just means that your body is really good at metabolizing fat and using fat and adjusting fat and breaking it down in a way that your body can use. So that's a good thing. But it also means you don't need as much of it as say, a protein in terms of grams. And this whole energy out concept.
So right when you go on a diet, basic advice is cut your calorie intake everyday by 250. and increase your calorie output everyday by 250 by exercising, and then you will have a daily caloric deficit of 500 calories. And over the course of a week, that will equate to one pound, right, you'll lose one pound. Okay, well, clearly, the cutting your calories in by 250 is far from exact science. But burning that 250 calories is also far from exact science, just because that's what your little watch told you that you did does not mean that's true. And if you are obsessed with filling those circles every day, and oh, I got to keep running on the treadmill, because I'm only at 220 calories, and I need to get to 250 like stop obsessing over that number. Just exercise. And we'll have a whole podcast about exercising too, because there is good science, tons of good science behind exercise that we really need to spend a lot of time going over it. But I just want to point out to you that the idea of the less calories in more calories out, you should not be married to that.
And I have to bring up the mental game because the mental game of calorie counting and macro counting usually ends up with people being miserable and feeling like failures. One of the reasons that it doesn't work long term is people can't stick to it long term, you cannot stick to a restricted diet long term. No one wants to do that no one wants to stick to something where they feel like they're being deprived all the time. You cut calories, you're miserable, you hate it, you're hungry all the time, but you power through because you want to lose that weight. And let's say you actually make it through that plateau, and you get to your goal weight, whoo. And then you start eating like a human again, because you hated that diet and you want to eat actual food again, and you want to live and you want to go out to dinner with your friends. And that diet sucked. And so now that diet did not fix the way your body works, your body still isn't working the way it's supposed to. And so you start giving it more food and more energy and more calories. And it's like, holy crap. Thank goodness, thank you for finally feeding me. I'm going to store all of this. So that in case you start starving me again, I'll have some fat stores I can rely on. Okay, you taught your body to start storing fat because it thinks you're gonna starve it again. That is the opposite you want to do because now your metabolism is wrecked. Your mind is jacked. You're in a terrible place. you're gaining weight again, you feel like a failure, you feel like nothing's ever gonna work. And you just start the whole cycle again. Have you been there? I think most people have.
The other thing to think about is that your body is highly adaptable. So if you keep cutting calories, right, you hit that plateau? Well, no, I got a diet harder. So I cut even more calories. When you keep cutting that energy. Your body is pre programmed to not allow that energy deficit. It wants to keep you at your setpoint This is how you are designed to make it through famine. The problem is you don't really face famine anymore. One of the ways that adapts is by slowing down your metabolism. So the harder you starve yourself, the slower your metabolism is gonna get. Because your body does not want you to be in a deficit. It wants to conserve energy because it's not getting enough energy.
Bottom line here. calorie counting is an ineffective way to lose weight. What the heck are you supposed to do? Here's the three strategies. We kind of talked about them before, you have to stop focusing on the numbers and start focusing on food quality. You got to shift the ratio of whole foods to processed foods that you're eating, we got to start reducing the processed foods and the toxins and start increasing the whole foods. Again, this is not like eat this don't eat that. It's just start changing the ratio just start making these steps. You want to start choosing the whole unprocessed foods organic. Again, we're avoiding those pesticides, pasture raised grass fed non GMO, as much as possible. Eat mostly vegetables, some protein, and a little healthy fat at each meal. So if you're looking at your plate, you're looking at about half a plate full of non starchy vegetables, then you're looking about quarter of your plate is a good protein. And the other quarter your plate is some fat, and some starchy vegetables and or low glycemic fruit as tolerated by you, everyone is a little bit different there. So you got to play with it and figure out what works just for you. You want to eat the rainbow, you want to get as many vitamins and nutrients and minerals as possible from as many food sources as possible, but also supplementation if that's what you need to do, eating a wide variety of food types, okay, focus on the food quality, not the numbers, all of that is going to help your body to start functioning more optimally.
So your body is this like incredible, amazing machine. But it gets really bogged down by all the toxins that we expose it to through food and water and air and the products that we put on our skin. So through diet and lifestyle, you need to start cleaning out the junk, you got to support your liver and your kidneys and your lungs and your skin. Those are all of your detoxifier. So you need to unplug your detoxifiers. So they can do their job. You got to balance the blood sugar, reduce your inflammation, and balance those hormones. By choosing better food, choosing better products, discovering food sensitivities, even for gut health, you're going to do those things, you're going to balance your blood sugar, heal your gut, reduce inflammation, balance hormones, all of these things work in concert, to help you be the most efficient fat burning, amazing, healthy you. And that is how you achieve weight loss and lasting weight loss because you got healthy, I really want you to hear me when I say this, we have to shift our thinking from lose weight, get healthy, to get healthy to lose weight.
If you want long term weight loss, you must get healthy, your must help your body function optimally. Does that make sense? We have to start shifting this. And if I do nothing else in my lifetime, I want it to be that I want to help everyone make that shift so that you can be long term healthy. And you also need to talk about your habits, right? Your habits are always moving you towards health and success or the other direction towards disease and failure of your goals. There is no middle ground here, really. So you have to start developing healthier habits like drinking water, going to bed on time getting some exercise, learning to cook healthy foods, getting some play and some fun in your life. And learning how your body works, learning who you are learning anything. You got to get rid of those bad habits like pouring a glass of wine every night with your dinner and watching TV in bed and grabbing fast food on the way home from work and mindlessly scrolling social media, right, we need to start getting rid of the bad habits, start creating better habits. If you can start to implement those really simple strategies, you guys let me just
Can I get like super honest with you for a second. Most of the people I talked to are looking for some kind of complex, like tell me to eat this. Don't eat that. Tell me how many macros tell me how many calories I want to track I'm gonna win. I'm gonna measure it, how many grams of this but like, right, you're looking for this plan, that thing that's going to change everything. Most of you do not have the basics down. Most of you are not drinking enough water every day. Most of you are not getting enough sleep every night. Most of you are not eating enough protein. Most of you are not eating enough vegetables, the very, very basics you guys, those are the places that you need to start. And once you get all those things down consistently, then you can start dialing in the rest. Does that make sense? Like we got to start with the low hanging fruit instead of skipping to this complex, crazy diet plan. Can we just stick with the basics and get that down? First? I guarantee if I put out a poll and I asked you guys how many hours of sleep you're all getting. Most of you did not get seven to nine hours of sleep for most nights of the last week. Let's start there. Let's start there.
Okay, we got to start with the basis we got to go back to the basics. So I hope this was a productive conversation for you to understand. calories are just one tiny piece. And one slightly inaccurate piece of this entire puzzle that is your body and how its functioning. counting calories is not the way to long term weight loss period, end of story. It's not going to work long term, it might work short term, but it's not going to learn work long term. If you want a long term solution, you have to deal with things like food quality, how your body works, functioning optimally, your body, having better habits, having a better mindset, understanding over eating binge and emotional eating behavior. Those are the things that are going to push you to long term weight loss and long term health and that is exactly why I put all of those concepts into the 12 weeks to weight loss and wellness program. If that sounds good to you, I want you to check that out. Tara faulmann.com. It's under the coaching tab. Please take a look at it. My goal is to create the program that is the last program you'll ever be on. No more diets no more bullshit. No more crappy fad stuff. No more tees and whatever powders like just real life real food real healthy body. That is my goal for you.
So if that sounds good, please head over and check it out. And until we talk again. Be well my friends.