No matter what you're doing right now to try and lose weight. If you don't have these three basics down, you won't get very far, doesn't really matter what your strategy is, if you're missing these three basics, you will not have long term success. What are those three basics? Well, we're going to talk about it today, and I'm going to tell you how to fix it. Let's go. 

Before we get going, I want to remind you to hop on over to tarafaulmann.com/coaching. Get your name on the list so that you will be the first to know about all the things happening. I got a lot of things cooking right now. And I really want you to be the first one to know about them. All right, let's talk about the three basics that you are probably not doing consistently. 

At any given time in the United States, there's about 45 million people on a diet, you're probably one of them. Especially right now as I recording this, we're heading into summer, the number is probably higher than 45 million. Every one of those people on a diet is counting this or tracking that are taking this food out or only eating this thing, all these rules, whatever the diet is, it doesn't matter. What most of the dieters are missing is these three very basic things that they are not doing consistently. And these three are three of the biggest reasons why the weight comes back on as soon as you're off the diet, or while you're still on the diet, and why you have to keep going back on these diets. If you don't address these three things, you ultimately will fail. In the end, it doesn't matter what your strategy is, it doesn't matter what your diet is, without these three things consistently in place, it's not going to work long term. 

So what are these three things? chronic mild dehydration, chronic sleep deprivation and chronic stress. Here's the bottom line for me. If you are not willing to address these three things in your life, then don't bother with the diet. Don't bother with the tracking, don't bother with counting, don't even start the diet. Because in the end, none of it will work unless these three things are taken care of if you're not willing to commit to getting enough water in your body every single day. Like let's just start with that. If you can't commit to just that, why are you committing to this diet? Why are you committing to counting calories every day? Why are you committing to tracking your macros? What's the point of you can't commit to just getting enough water in your body. So I want you to really like I hope that slapped you across the face. Some of you you might have been a little trigger. That's a little tough love. Because if you're not willing to commit to these three things, don't bother committing to the rest, you have to get these three things down first, okay? Or at least if they're not perfect, which you will find it's hard to get them perfect, but at least move in the direction of consistently performing these three things. The water, the sleep, the stress. 

Okay, so let's start with the water, chronic dehydration or acute dehydration. Those are both more like hospitalization situations that that's not most of us. Most of us are walking around in the state of mild dehydration. So your body is 60% water. And water is involved in some capacity in literally every bodily process that you undergo inside your body. So that's everything from digestion to your metabolism to your brain functioning and literally being able to think. So how do you know if you have this kind of mild chronic dehydration? Well, the first sign is usually headaches, usually not real bad headaches, headaches, you can't really figure out the reason for what's happening in your brain is that without enough water, you have excess metabolic waste. So all of the cell functioning in your body in your brain and your body creates waste, there's not enough water to flush that waste out, it gets built up in there, and also decreased blood and oxygen flow in the brain, again due to not enough water. And that results in a headache. 

You also will notice impaired brain function and mood. So in studies, subjects have shown with just mild dehydration, they show impaired cognitive function, so they're less able to think clearly, they have impaired memory, they have increased fatigue, increased tension and increased anxiety. And that's especially in female subjects, they found female subjects fared worse in these mild dehydration studies than the males did. You also may notice an increase in allergies. So a concentration of histamine again, because your body relies on water to flush out the waste and the excess of pretty much everything that buildup of histamine can cause those more strong allergy reaction. So if you suffer from seasonal allergies, like everyone in my family does, drinking enough water is going to be really important. You will also notice some digestive problems like acid reflux and constipation. Those are both triggered by mild dehydration, food cravings. If you're trying to lose weight, you don't want to increase food cravings in any capacity. So what you're craving generally is sweet or salty things because what's happening is your body is misinterpreting thirst signals because you've been ignoring thirst signals. And so your body starts misinterpreting them for hunger signals, especially hunger for sweet and salty things. 

Here's where the rubber meets the road for those of you who are actually trying to lose weight or get healthy. In animal studies, it has been clearly shown in multiple studies that without water, your body is not properly metabolizing stored fat or carbs. Here's what's happening to metabolize fat, the process of metabolizing fat, so metabolizing just means you're breaking it down and using it for energy in your body. Right? So we're taking that store fat, we're breaking it down so that we can use it, aka we're burning fat. So burning fat is called lipolysis. Well, the first step of lipolysis is hydrolysis. What does hydro mean? It means water. Remember your Latin, maybe a little bit of it. So the first step of breaking down fat, aka fat burning is hydrolysis. So hydrolysis is where more water molecules interact with the fats, the triglycerides breaks down the triglycerides into glycerol and fatty acids, so then your body can use it. So water is essential to the process of breaking down fat in your body burning that fat so that you can use it for energy. So if you're trying to lose weight, what you're really trying to do is lose fat. And if you're trying to lose fat you need enough water in your body. Okay, Am I clear we get this. 

So ideally, every day, your baseline water amount should be at least half your body weight in ounces. So for example, if you're 140 pound person, you should be drinking about 70 ounces of water a day, that is your baseline. Okay? There are a million reasons why you might need to be drinking more than that. So if you're exercising or if it's hot, or humid where you are or depending on even women, the time of the month, the type where you are in your cycle, like there's a million reasons that you would need to drink more than that baseline amount. So commit at least to the baseline half your body weight in ounces. So for me personally, I have a 32 ounce water bottle, I drink at least three of those a day. That's 96 ounces. That's whether or not I'm working out if I work out I drink even more. That's like where my sweet spot is. Don't wait till you're thirsty. You need to drink little bits of water all day long. Don't chug it all at once. You are sipping water all day, at least minimum baseline half your body weight announces clear. 

Okay, let's talk about chronic sleep deprivation. 70% of adults report that they regularly don't get enough sleep and I bet if I polled my friends it'd be closer to like 95% of my friends would tell me they don't feel like they get enough sleep. There's a lot of things happening in your body when you sleep, some of the most important physiological processes are happening in your body while you sleep, namely, namely the process of autophagy, where you have little cells that go through your body and just clean up all the waste, so that you can function better than next day. So what's happening when you don't get enough sleep in terms of getting healthy and losing weight? Well, first of all, when you are sleep deprived, you have diminished decision making skills, you already know this to be true. When you feel tired, you feel like your brain doesn't work. When you're more tired, you're more likely to make poor food choices, you're going to eat whatever's fast, and whatever sounds good, instead of the things you actually planned to eat, or the things that you know, would be a little bit better for you. So what's happening is that when you're sleep deprived, the reward centers in your brain start to light up, and it's gonna start to cause you to crave foods that are highly rewarding, like salty carbs or sweets. So here we got a double whammy, right if we aren't drinking enough water or causing craving for salty, sweet, carbey foods. And if we don't get enough sleep, we're craving salty or sweet or carbey foods, right? 

This is not going to work for us is that when you're tired, studies show that people also tend to eat larger portions of food throughout the day. So no matter what the food is, tired, people eat more throughout the day. Okay, so now you're eating more, and you're likely eating more of things that are not great for you or not getting you closer to your goals. All because you didn't get a good night's sleep. Within just four days of mild Sleep deprivation, your insulin sensitivity can drop by 30%. This is a big deal, because losing insulin sensitivity means your body doesn't respond correctly to the food you eat, and it's more likely to store all the calories you take in as fat. Okay, so let me repeat, when you are tired, your insulin sensitivity is reduced. Reduced insulin sensitivity equals more fat storage, aka you get fatter. And not to mention that the place that the fat is most likely to be stored is around your midsection that visceral fat. So you know that that is the more dangerous type of fat that is highly correlated to heart disease, chronic sleep deprivation, more fat storage, heart disease, okay? Are we on the same path here? This is not good. The other thing that chronic sleep deprivation and when I say sleep deprivation, I don't mean by very much. I'm going to tell you a talk about that in a sec. 

Chronic sleep deprivation or even just sleep deprivation of a day, like one night like one bad night causes a cortisol spike. Cortisol is your stress hormone, your stress hormone tells your body to not burn fat. It tells your body to conserve fat. So it actually is slowing down your metabolism. It's slowing down your function to burn stored fat. So now I'm storing more fat and I'm burning less of it. Because I'm tired. Okay, and I again, I gotta tell you, it only takes one night. But most of us are not tired for just one night. Most of us don't get one night bad sleep, we get a week of bed sleep get months of bad sleep, how much should you be getting adults should be getting seven to nine hours. Now it's a little variable, my husband would be more at the seven hour range, I would be more at the nine hour range. But studies just constantly keep agreeing that anything less than seven hours can be detrimental anything more than nine hours can actually be detrimental. So if you're sleeping 10, 11, 12 hours at a night as an adult, there's probably something else going on, you're probably not getting good sleep while you're sleeping. So things like sleep apnea, you might feel like you need to sleep for 11 hours, but your body doesn't feel like it got 11 hours. That makes sense. So seven to nine hours is the sweet spot. I know some of you are gonna be like, I'm crazy. I work just fine on five hours. long term health says no. Says Nope, that's not true. Even if you think it's true right now, long term. That's not true. Okay, that this I'm just telling you what the studies say. So you've got to start doing things that will get you into that seven to nine hour sweet spot more consistently. Now life happens, you're not going to get ideal sleep every single night. That's just probably never going to happen. But if you can get it most days of the week, then you're going to be looking pretty good and you can avoid some of these problems that we just talked about. 

Okay, so the third basic that you really need to focus on is chronic stress. So we just talked about cortisol right well, we're gonna talk about it a little bit more, because that's what's happening in this state of chronic stress. So your body has this amazing system of stress reaction. So when you experience an acute stress, so let's say, historically, maybe that was the saber toothed tiger, right? coming after you or like, the scary night with a sword, I don't know what coming after you. So what happens is the acute stress happens, your adrenal glands release cortisol, that's your flight or fight, right. And then after the threat passes, your cortisol then returns to normal and your body returns to normal. What happens for most of us in today's times, we have chronic stress, which means we have this constant flow of cortisol in our body. Now, you already know that that constant flow of cortisol is telling your body to not burn fat, right? We just learned that talking about sleep. But here's what else it does. It's an appetite stimulant, it makes you want to eat more. This is one of the reasons that when you're stressed, you want comfort food, right, I want comfort food, because I'm so stressed out, because cortisol tells your body to eat more, so it tells your body to eat more, and it tells your body to burn less. That sounds like a recipe for weight gain to me. 

Not only that, but again, the cortisol is causing your body to store that fat around your midsection that visceral fat, because under stress, under this chronic stress, your metabolism slows down. There was a study in the Journal of bio psych it found that women's resting metabolic rate was reduced by 104 calories a day, when under emotional stress, so that would be a bit more of an acute, so just a stressor that day and emotional stressor, they burn 104 less calories than they would on a normal day. Okay, that adds up over a year that's 11 pounds, give or take because calories, you know, are a little subjective a little bit, not exact science. But imagine, if that's all that was happening in your life, you were in, you were in a state of chronic stress. Just simply being in a state of chronic stress, you could gain 11 pounds a year. That sounds awful. Long term stress results in depression, high blood pressure, insomnia, heart disease, anxiety, obesity, stroke, you see, all these things are related. So if you're you are you're trying to diet, dieting, by the way is going to put your body under physical stress, which is going to jack up your hormones and mess with your appetite suppressant hormones and mess with your sex hormones and release a lot of cortisol. But now you also add the chronic emotional stress that you're under. Some of it might also be because of your time and you have a recipe for fat, you have a recipe for storing more fat and burning less fat. 

So do you see then that doesn't matter what diet you're on. If you don't get these three basic physiological functions down consistently. It's a losing scenario. It doesn't matter cutting calories, cutting calories, when you're in a state of mild dehydration, or sleep deprivation, or chronic stress. If you cut calories on top of that, you're totally screwed. There's no way this is working long term, you absolutely are going to get fat again. Like there's no two ways around it. So you have to commit to getting these three things down first. So what are we going to do about this? Well, I will tell you in the future, I will have an entire podcast dedicated to each one of these subjects. But I want to tell you today, the one thing that you can do that tackles all three of these things, the One Ring to rule them all if you little nerdy analogies. The one thing you can do that really will hit all three of these things. Super simple, but very few of us do it consistently. And it is exercise. Yeah, I told you we're talking about basics today. Right? We talked about water, sleep, stress, and now exercise. If you can't get the basics down, the rest won't work. 

So what does exercise do? Well exercise will naturally increase your water consumption because it will naturally make you sweat more and have to drink more water. So not only do you drink more water while you're exercising but you actually will drink more water throughout the day. If you are exercising. So when when exercising also helps you sleep better. So you know, when you've done this when you have exercised during the day you sleep better at night, that is shouldn't be a surprise to you, you've probably experienced that in your life. And exercise is also the number one way to reduce stress. It's the number one way, whatever exercise that is for you. So let's talk about how that looks. Exercise looks lots of different ways. Sometimes I don't even choose to call it exercise, I just try to call it movement, just move your body move your body more often in a day. So the best exercise for you to do is the one that you're going to do, whatever that is, I mean, and I literally mean, whatever that is, as long as it's something that you're going to do consistently, then that's the thing that you should do, do the exercise, do the motion, the movement that makes you feel good. 

So some general exercise guidelines that you would follow, we are trying to hit 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week. So moderate exercise would look like a brisk walk or preferably a jog. Something that moderately gets your heart rate up, right, yoga could be considered moderate exercise, Barre class could be dancing, things like that. So that's about 30 minutes a session for about five, four or five days a week, or you could do 75 minutes of vigorous exercise per week. And you only need to do that about 15 minutes a session for five days a week. So 30 minutes, five days a week of moderate exercise, or 15 minutes, five days a week of vigorous exercise. So vigorous exercise looks something more like the hit class that you take at the gym or even Zumba. For a lot of people that can get pretty vigorous running would be vigorous sprint drills would be vigorous things that are really getting that heart rate up. I love for that more vigorous training, a interval style training, or you could have some combination of the two. So some days are the more moderate exercise some days would be the more vigorous exercise. And I'm going to tell you that in between those, you are going to stand up more, you are going to walk more you are going to move more, you're going to sit less, okay. So it's not just what's happening in that 30 minutes of exercise. What counts just as much, if not more is what's happening for the rest of your day. If you sit at a desk for your job, you need to be getting up minimum every single hour and moving walk around the office go up and down the stairs a couple times. Instead of going into a meeting and sitting Why don't you take a walk and have your meeting, like incorporate more movement into your day that's going to be as important or more important as these workout sessions that you're going to do. Does that make sense? So it's not one or the other. It's both together. Ideally, you would be doing both together, you're moving more during the day. And then you're also doing these 30 or 15 minute workouts five days a week. 

So one of those vigorous workouts, I'll just give you like a quick example. I like to do a hit style. So that's maybe like a minute of work and then 30 seconds of rest. So that's just like a two minute, warm up. eight rounds of that minute on 30 seconds off, and then a minute cooldown. So what are you doing during those eight rounds? Well, anything you could do jumping jacks, you could jump rope, you could sprint, you could jog, you could do burpees you could lift weights of different different movements and different body parts. You can mix it up in lots of different ways. I personally generally like to do weights with mine, I so I do. I mix up some aerobic things and then I mix up some weight things because resistance exercise is very important. Again, we'll talk about exercise more in depth, but I just want you to have kind of a basic understanding of why this is so important. And that hitting exercise every week is going to help you with these three basics, the water, the sleep and the stress. I also am going to put in the show notes, some links for a couple of friends in mine that have really great workouts that are free online that you can do with them. 

The first one is Serena Baron fitness on YouTube. She's got some amazing workouts on there. Some of them are really quick. They're all like 30 minutes or less, most of them are in the 20 minute range. So you can modify that to wherever your fitness level is. She's an amazing coach. So I'm gonna put her link in the show notes as well. So if you're looking for some things to do at home, check her out and my other friend is Ashley Armstrong. She owns fit 15 and I'm gonna put her link in here too because she has 15 minute workouts that you can do with her. She also has some other training programs. And apps and things like that. But you can just get that 15 minute vigorous workout in for those five days a week, she makes it super easy for you to do that. So check out those links for free workouts that you can do at home from two absolutely super knowledgeable and amazing trainers. 

Okay, you guys, it feels, it might feel strange that we dedicated an entire podcast to these very basic things. But I hope that I really, really drove home the point for you that if you aren't doing these things, the rest doesn't matter. Right? If you aren't drinking enough water, if you aren't getting enough sleep, if you are under chronic stress, then it's not going to matter what diet you try, because ultimately, it's not going to work long term. So if you need help getting these three things down consistently, I have lots of tools and lots of things that will help you just get on that newsletter. And that's the kind of stuff that I put out in those newsletters every single month. So Tara faulmann.com, forward slash coaching, get your name on that newsletter. And then you can get some of these tips and tools and tricks and things all emailed right to your inbox. Okay, I hope this was helpful you guys, I hope that you can start consistently committing to these things to working on them. Just remember, it's a process you are always in process as a human. You are always in process. You're never going to get it perfect. It's not always going to be right. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not as good, but it's always in process. Okay, give yourself a little bit of grace here. If you're not doing these things very well right now. I'm gonna focus on right. Alright, my friend until we talk again. Hey, friends, thanks so much for being here. 

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