4 Things to Track Instead of Calories – Especially if Your Client Wants to Lose Weight

Especially if you or your client is female, especially if you or your client wants to lose weight, and especially if hormone health is a priority.

Women have been conditioned to believe that smaller is better, often at the expense of their health and longevity. Many are still being told by their doctors and health advisers to lose weight, and then being directed to calorie restrictive eating plans, despite calorie restrictive diets being catastrophic for women’s hormonal balance.

I’ve talked a lot about this before in my Female Fitness Myths podcast, which you can access here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqX0c1K391U&list=PLeRAiXlvYPb6UYBn_Qa1qgSaIjoKXWjqe 

So not to belabour the point, I won’t go into it again, but suffice to say that calorie restrictive diets don’t work the same for women as they do for men, nor does fasting. If hormone health is important for you and your female clients, here are 4 things I would track instead of calories…

1) Fibre

So many reasons for women to up their fibre intake! Number 1 being that our gut motility (ie. How “mobile” our gut is, how quickly and efficiently we push food through and extract nutrients out) is slower and less effective than men’s gut motility¹. This means we could do with a little bit of extra help to push things through in the form of fibre.

Number two is that fibrous foods usually contain small amounts of naturally occurring phytoestrogens, which can supplement our body’s supply, and blunt the edges of our Oestrogen crashes during menopause². Fibre is also one of the ways we excrete excess hormones – cortisol, oestrogens, etc all come out in the toilet³. Thus eating enough fibre is an excellent way to balance your hormones, including the ones involved in appetite and satiation.

Thirdly, high fibre diets significantly reduce your risk of disease. A high(er) fibre diet will⁴:

• Lower your cholesterol
• Help manage a healthy body weight
• Stabilise glucose and blood sugar levels
• Decrease your risk of heart disease
• Decrease your risk of developing diabetes
• Decrease your risk of developing some cancers, especially bowel and breast cancer

The recommended daily intake for fibrous foods per day is:

• 2 serves of fruit
• 5 serves of vegetables

I would add to this 2 serves of ground seeds, nuts, or cooked legumes.

About 1C or medium sized piece constitutes a serve of fruit and vegetables About ½ C constitutes a serve of legumes, and half of that again for ground nuts and seeds.

In grams this constitutes around 30g per day, be careful not to exceed 40g per day because this can interfere with your absorption of some important key minerals. Enough is brilliant and more isn’t better!

This becomes more important as we age; women going through peri menopause would benefit from concentrating on this rather than their macros or caloric intake! Remember to GRADUALLY increase your fibrous food intake and drink lots of water!

2) Steps

You may have heard the phrase “sitting is the new smoking”. This is because the health risks of sitting are on parr with smoking, it is that bad for you! A sedentary lifestyle will increase your risk of certain diseases even if you exercise regularly (although the exercise does reduce that risk, not as much as an “active lifestyle”)⁵.

This is why we measure steps. Steps are an easy way to get someone more active throughout the day. Just getting up every hour for 10min at a time can have a dramatic impact on your risk of all-cause mortality – and in this case, more is definitely better⁶! Aim for 8,200 steps or more per day, with or without formal exercise sessions to reap the benefits!

3) Track Protein

I know I know, it’s a macro!! Protein is literally the only macro that I track, and the reason is that most of the women I train don’t get enough. Furthermore, I give them the option of tracking grams or serves.

The recommended daily intake of protein according to Australian Eat for Health guidelines is between 37 g/day (0.60 g/kg) and 46 g/day (0.75 g/kg) , which is a lot less than they recommend for men where they recommend between 52 g/day (0.68 g/kg) and 64 g/day (0.84 g/kg)⁷.

However, research specifically performed in female populations by Dr Stacy Sims has demonstrated that women need considerably more protein per kilo per day than men, advising at least 1.6g per kilo of bodyweight per day, and up to 2.4g per kilo of bodyweight per day for active and peri / post menopausal women⁸.

The Eat for Health Guidelines acknowledges that women need to increase their intake post menopause, between 46 g/day (0.75 g/kg) and 57 g/day (0.94 g/kg), but it’s still not enough for us to build the kind of muscle that we need⁹.

As you can see, the RDI is woefully inadequate for preventing frailty or building muscle mass in women. Worse, it seems like the numbers are based on research performed on men, then calculated to the fact that women are smaller. Women have a really hard time building muscle, maintaining muscle, and holding onto muscle as they age, and for this reason they need MORE protein than men per kilo of body weight.

Because you have to eat so much to get that much protein, you do not have to calorie restrict, cut out whole food groups, or track the other macros to achieve fat loss – especially if you’re also getting enough fibre and steps!

4) Sleep

Finally, I would track sleep. I’ve talked a lot about sleep in the past, so I won’t flog a dead horse again here, but suffice to say if she’s not sleeping, odds are she doesn’t have the optimal hormonal balance – this can sabotage fat loss goals.

Remember, sleep deprivation is a major stressor on a woman’s body, and as such, has to be managed before hormone-friendly fat loss is possible.

REFERENCES