653: Metabolism Makeover and How Your Subconscious Mind Impacts Weight With Megan Hansen

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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from Wellnessmama.com, and this episode is all about metabolism and some things you probably didn’t know about it, and I really enjoyed this conversation. I’m here with Megan Hansen, who is a dietitian and author and a single mom, and she’s the founder of what’s called Metabolism Makeover, which is a nutrition business that’s focused on metabolic health and healthy weight. And she has a community of over 40 dietitians and over 7000 past and present clients. And she’s dedicated to making weight loss an empowering process instead of one that is filled with guilt and shame and restriction.

And we get to go deep on a lot of her work in this podcast. It’s such a good conversation. We talk about what initially led her into this work and her own experience with nutrition, weight loss and metabolism, and how she’s helped thousands of women with her approach of teaching over telling. We talk about what metabolism actually is and why we need to understand this to work with our body. Basically, how metabolism is simply how the body uses what we put into it, and if it’s not doing that well, what are some of the things we can look at?

We talk about the problem with chronically undereating and how this can be tough on the metabolism. She goes through her six pillars of healthy metabolism, including things like blood sugar control, having enough muscle and movement, stress management, and even gut health. She gives even more reasons that consuming enough protein is important. We talk about what weight loss resistance is and how it can relate back to stress, about breaking the cycle of being overly busy and stressed, and breaking the idea that we need to run ourselves into the ground for the sake of our families or our careers, or that busyness is a badge of honor.

She explains what the stress bucket is and how we can manage it. We talk about protein, fiber, and healthy fats, and how to make sure we’re nourishing our body well, and the importance of micro habits and focusing on one thing at a time, as well as her focus on understanding that the body is not at war with you, it’s just simply talking to you. And she gives so many practical tips in this episode. I’ve had a chance to preview her book, and it’s so well written. I know that you can learn a lot from this conversation. And so, without any further weight, let’s join Megan. Megan, welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Megan: Yeah, thanks for having me, Katie.

Katie: I’m excited to dive into this topic today. I know you and I have got to have a little bit of that conversation leading up to this, and I think the work you’re doing is awesome. And I would love to actually start by hearing a lot about your background and how you got into this work, because from the little bit I know of you, this is not how you originally started. And I think the story is cool.

Megan: Yeah. Let’s go all the way back to high school, because I think that’s where it really started. I was an athlete. I wanted to get better at my sport. I was a swimmer and a soccer player, and I had goals. I’m very much like the typical high achiever goal setter. I will do anything it takes to reach a goal, even when I was 14 years old.

And I thought, okay, I need to go kind of outside, just the typical showing up at practice every day, so what else do I need to do? And I picked up my first fitness magazine, and I thought, this is where I’m going to learn how to get in the extra reps that I need to qualify for the state meet next year. And I started reading to this fitness magazine, and I realized it was, like, 50% nutrition. I thought, that is so weird. I had no idea that this had anything to do with performance or how I was going to feel every day. And I started making those swaps, like the Carnation instant breakfast that I was eating every morning before practice for Oatmeal and taking my lunch to school. And immediately started feeling the effects in my body and not just having more energy and being able to focus more at school, but also really noticing at practice on, like, Monday morning. If I ate junk food all weekend, I could feel it, like, big time when I was trying to swim. And if I stuck to my normal regimen over the weekend, I felt a lot better.

And, yes, I qualified for the state meet the next year, my times improved, and so that’s when I really made my first connection between nutrition and food and performance, and I started making that connection in my body. So now, looking back, I realized I got a little obsessive over it, which I tend to do with most things, and that has its positives and negatives, but I didn’t realize it at the time. I thought I was just being healthy. This was a good thing. And when I got to college, I realized I could study this and get a degree in it, which I’m like, Cool. That sounds a lot more exciting than business school.

So I went to school to be a dietitian, and one of the first classes that I took, we were in medical nutrition therapy is what it was called. And we started out with learning how to teach patients how to lose weight. And so any patient that came to us, we would first, regardless of what they came to us for, we would get their height, their weight, they’d figure out their BMI, if they were in the overweight category, we would put them on a diet. And we did this by looking at what they were called ideal body weight charts. So we look at your body weight, we look at the ideal body weight, we figure out how much you need to lose, and we put you in the appropriate calorie deficit.

And part of learning this was we actually had to go home as students and do a project where we could either put ourselves on a calorie deficit if we felt we needed to, or maintenance calories. And we would track our food in a food diary by hand. There was no MyFitness pal then and 60 to 90 minutes cardio a day if you wanted to lose weight, that’s what we would tell patients. And then 1200, 1300, 1400 calories a day. So I decided I needed to lose weight because according to this ideal body weight chart, I had 5 pounds to lose. So I was doing the 1200 calories a day, I was doing the cardio, and I remember coming home one night from the dining hall after getting my 1200 calories that day, and I was starving. And I came into my room, I took my roommate’s peanut butter, because of course, I was not buying peanut butter. That was a no food, that was too many calories. And I ate pretty much the entire jar of peanut butter with my hands because we didn’t have utensils for whatever reason at the time. And I just remember sitting there and being like, what just happened?

But what’s interesting is there was never a moment that I thought, why did I do that? What would have driven me to eat this jar of peanut butter like an animal on the floor in my roommates? Because she’s going to be pissed at me now. And I just remember the guilt, the shame, laying in bed thinking about how am I going to burn this off tomorrow? Do I skip breakfast in the morning? And this became a pretty regular occurrence for me, like this binge or overeat restrict cycle for the next five, six years of my life. So all throughout college and all throughout my internship, and I had no control over food, and I ended up gaining maybe like 20 to 25 pounds over this period, which may not seem like a ton of weight, but it was for somebody that was constantly trying to lose weight.

And now looking back on it, I think the reason I never actually went and worked as a dietitian anywhere, even after I graduated, I just kind of said I didn’t really like it. I didn’t like my internship, not really interested. Yes, this isn’t really what I want to do. Well, it obviously is. This is my entire life’s work now. But I think I just felt like a fraud. I felt like all I wanted to do was help people with food and their weight, and that’s what I studied in college. But the number one thing that I struggled with in my own life was food and my weight. So how could I ever go help other people with this when I can’t even get it down myself?

And the funny part of this story is that I eventually this goes back to Fitness magazine, where I had a subscription and I would be reading it. And I just kept reading about weightlifting and how it’s seeing this shift from doing cardio all the time for weight loss to actually lifting weights, and how lifting weights can help you burn more calories after the workout and muscle burns more than fat. And I’m reading this and I’m like, this just doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t burn as many calories. I’m running five, six, seven miles a day. You can’t tell me that this is going to work.

But again, being this high achiever, goal oriented, I said, there has to be another way, and I am going to figure it out, because what I’m doing isn’t working. So what the heck, let’s just start here. And I went all in. I just dropped the cardio altogether. I started weightlifting, like probably five days a week at that point. And I think I was lucky enough that I was in my 20s and I didn’t have metabolic damage. I guess to the point as some women maybe in their 30s and 40s, that struggle a lot more. But the weight immediately started coming off, and I was like, whoa, what else is there? What else could I be doing that’s not working? What else have I learned that? Where else have I been lied to? I think that’s kind of originally the thought that I started to adopt and I slowly but surely started shifting the way that I was approaching food and my body. And I got obsessed, of course, and started reading like every book you can imagine that went against the grain of what I learned in school.

And then eventually I got to a point where I started blogging about it, and then I started taking clients just very slowly. And it’s really only been in the last six years that I started my practice, but when I started seeing clients, they all had the same problem that I had. They were in the exact same place where they were tracking their macros. They knew what to eat. It was like I’m air quoting here. They knew what to do because they were doing the same thing that I was doing. And so the approach that I took was, okay, I don’t need to tell you what to eat. I don’t need to tell you how to exercise, you know, what you’re doing, but I’m going to teach you instead, kind of like I taught myself.

I’ve always taken this approach of teaching over telling. I’m going to teach you how your body works, and I’m going to teach you about your metabolism, and I’m going to teach you about carbs and protein and fat. And I’m not going to say this is how many that you need to eat every day, but I’m just going to teach you what it doesn’t what they do in your body, how your body metabolizes them and breaks them down. Why is it so important to eat protein at every meal? Because if you have the why, you don’t get to a point where you’re like, well, I’m going to eat this way just because my coach told me to, but I really want the ice cream or I really want the pasta. It’s so easy in those moments to just make a different decision. That sounds good to you, but if you really understand what it’s going to do to your body and how it’s going to make you feel, you might make a different decision. And it worked with these clients. They finally, after many of them, years of dieting, started to turn things around and started to actually not just see weight loss, because weight loss is cool, but sustained weight loss years later that I can go back to. And they’ve kept it off and they feel amazing.

Katie: There’s so many parts of your story I resonate with, especially as a mom. I love that your focus on teaching versus telling. I think this is also extremely effective with our kids and that they’re capable of understanding so much and that we can give them those tools from an earlier age than I learned. And it sounds like that you learned as well. I also have a daughter who’s a high school athlete, so very much where your story began. And it’s been really cool to see her journey and how she’s learning to focus on fueling her body and recovering and giving it enough nutrients and enough volume of food, which even at 14,15, seems like it’s a bit of struggle for a lot of women. I feel like guy athletes have an easier time learning to eat enough food and maybe women struggle a little bit more with that.

And I love that you also mentioned the guilt and shame dynamic. I think this has been so ingrained for so many women for such a long time that we I know for me, I came to fear food for a while and I was chronically undereating for so many years and I’ve talked about this here as well. Like you, I also felt like a fraud for a while because I was in the health world, but I also still had thyroid issues at that time. And that was something that was very much top of mind for me. So often and when I learned, like you to fuel my body to actually get enough food, everything started shifting.

And I think this brings us to an amazing next point that for background sake is important to cover, which is let’s talk about some of the misconceptions about metabolism and maybe also define what metabolism is. Because I feel like this is a topic that maybe isn’t sort of talked about in the mainstream in a positive way for women. And that sort of unlocking that can be really freeing when you understand what’s actually happening and not these sound bites we get from magazines about this one supplement that’s going to rev up your metabolism or whatever the sort of headline sensational titles are.

Megan: Yeah. So let’s just first start by kind of defining metabolism. And we can define metabolism in a lot of different ways, but I think an easy way to look at it is we see it typically as our metabolism is something that makes us gain or lose weight. But our metabolism is really how the body uses what you put into it. So food to function. And the body if you think of it as something that is always just building or breaking down. So when we consume food, the food is broken down into molecules that then it utilizes to make energy and then that energy is used to build or repair cells.

So when we consume more calories than our body is able to use to build a repair, then they’re stored simply as fat. So instead of thinking about metabolism as being fast or slow, I like to think about it in terms of efficiency. When we say we have, again air quoting here, a slow metabolism, it just means that our body is not utilizing all the calories that we consume. And this may be because we’re over consuming. It may also be something that’s just not quite right in the body that’s causing it to underutilize calories. And this is something that I see often in my practice. And then when we say we have a fast metabolism, typically what we mean is we have a healthy metabolism and it means that our body is doing an A plus job utilizing the calories that we’re consuming. So someone with a healthy metabolism typically doesn’t worry about weight gain because their body is metabolically flexible. And typically these people also have pretty steady energy levels throughout the day.

So I think about your metabolism as the blood that’s pumping through your body right now. Your lungs, your breathing, everything that’s happening, it all ties back to your metabolism because the calories that you’re eating is fueling all of those functions in your body. And I think this is important to understand because we’re talking about chronically undereating. So when you’re chronically undereating, let’s say you’re someone that typically should, you should be burning 2000 calories a day. Okay, I’m just going to throw that easy number out there because your body is utilizing 2000. That’s what I mean, it’s utilizing 2000 a day. But suddenly you put yourself on a diet for months at a time and you go months or years eating, I don’t know, 1500 calories a day, let’s say. Well, eventually your body is going to have to adjust, right? Because it’s got to carry out all the functions in your body to keep you alive.

And so that’s where I like to use this analogy of like if you were driving a car and you were using an entire tank of gas every day, driving around to different job sites, but then suddenly you were only allowed to fill your tank with, let’s say, three quarters of a tank. There’s a gas shortage. You can only do three quarters of a tank a day. Okay, what are you going to do? Well, you’re not going to go out and just drive around to all those job sites and expect to get back home. At the end of the day, you’re going to be stranded on the side of the road. You don’t have a full tank of gas. So you have to adjust. You have to go to maybe it’s less job sites, maybe you find a shortcut, maybe you buy a hybrid, I don’t know. But your body does the same thing and it eventually will adapt. And that’s why after long periods of time of undereating, you can get to a point where you’re suddenly not seeing the results that you used to. You might even start gaining weight, eating less calories.

The way that I like to approach weight loss with clients, whether we’re talking about losing weight or just feeling good every day, is by focusing on the metabolism versus just this math equation of eating less and exercising more or a calorie deficit, however you want to look at it. So what are all the things that play into having a healthy metabolism? And I think of it as there’s a lot of things, but I really boil it down to six pillars. And so I like to look at blood sugar control and I think blood sugar, I love focusing on blood sugar more than anything else because I think if you get the blood sugar part right, everything else just kind of falls into place. Like, you’re naturally eating foods that are burning off hunger hormones. You’re naturally eating foods that are increasing satiety, making you feel good, increasing your energy levels. It helps you to avoid having cravings. We’re kind of covering all the bases, especially when it comes to weight loss, if we’re just controlling for blood sugar.

Next is muscle. So muscle of course, is extremely important for our metabolic health and just our long term health span, longevity, everything. And having more muscle on the body, of course, is going to help your metabolism just function, better. Movement. So that could include walking, but that could also just include just moving the body more, moving in different positions throughout the day. I’m in the worst position right now, sitting here on my chair, but at least trying to get up. Stand at your desk, squat at your desk. So we encourage clients to not just focus on their steps, but also just get in a variety of movement throughout the day.

Sleep is huge. Of course, everyone agrees on this. So really focusing in on getting enough sleep, because your sleep has a huge impact not just on your metabolism, but also on your weight and just having the ability to manage your weight and your hunger on a daily basis. You’ve got to get the sleep part right.

Number five is stress management. This is huge. And then number six is gut health. So really what I like to do is I look at all six of these and again, teach each one how do each of these pillars impact your metabolic health? And if you can get this part down, like, if you can get these foundations down, more than likely, and I’m really going off of my own experience in working with thousands of clients, most people will be able to get to a point, and it may take months. I don’t know how long it took for you, Katie, when you started focusing more on these pillars versus eating less and exercising more. It can take months and months, but the weight will eventually start to come off. And if it doesn’t, we always say, like, if it doesn’t, for whatever reason, at that point, it may be time to take a look under the hood, and we can refer you out, or we also do one on one functional nutrition within my business. But we can start looking at labs and looking to see where the issue might be in the body and why you’re not actually seeing results.

Katie: That makes sense. And it did take me months, probably, if not longer, but I did pretty instantly notice when I started doing things like just eating bare minimum enough protein and eating more food, I noticed immediately my sleep got better and I had an insane amount of energy. Like that first month of adaptation, I felt like I told people this, I felt like I could run through a wall, I had so much energy. And it’s funny because looking back, I’m like, this actually was modeled for me very well my whole life, and I never paid attention to it.

My mom is mostly French, and I feel like in a lot of ways, they sort of have a healthier understanding of this as an average than we do in America. But she always I remember thinking as a kid, like, wow, she can eat so much food. And she stayed the exact same weight my whole entire life, which was the same weight she was when she got married. And she would every meal eat multiple plates of food. It was like a huge salad and then tons of protein and all these vegetables and she would just keep eating and it took me so long. And it’s funny looking back to connect those dots but now I think of it as kind of like a furnace analogy. Like if you want to make a fire hotter what do you do? You put fuel on it. You don’t take the fuel away.

And I also love your gas analogy. I think that really helps to kind of bring understanding to that. And as a mom, I also always think if this is a lesson I can model and give my kids earlier that maybe they can avoid those downfalls that I ran into. Like how much better their life could be at younger ages just from surely having enough nutrients in their body. And it’s so funny to me in some ways that in America we’re having this conversation about understanding the actual basics of just making sure our body has enough resources for the tasks that we want it to do. But I really love your six pillars. I’m curious, are there ones that when you work with clients, you see them tend to struggle with more than others or any tips within each of those to help people kind of get started in the right direction?

Megan: Yeah, sure. So we can start with the one that I see people struggle with the most is probably stress. And what I really see and I’m able to see this in our one on one practice because we are actually looking at labs and we can trace back and see where is this weight loss resistance actually occurring. And nine times out of ten, probably 9.9 times out of ten, it roots back to stress. So this one is really important and it’s also one that is really, I would say, near and dear to my heart because stress is something massive, massive stress is something that I struggled with for years.

I went through a period of pregnancy, postpartum and divorce within an 18 month period and during the same time, massive debt building my business, becoming the sole provider for both myself and my daughter. So I get stress and I understand that it can be a hole that we get into that seems impossible to pull ourselves out of. But I’m going to tell you something that I’m going to tell your audience, something that my best friend said to me at a time where I had kind of gotten to a point where I was maybe managing my stress a little better than I had in the past, I stopped drinking. I started eating a little more. I was feeling like I was really taking care of myself. But I was at this point really overworking and I was trying to build the business. And there was one day where I couldn’t get out of bed. I mean, when I say I couldn’t get out of bed, I literally could not get out of bed. I had to call someone to help me with my daughter. I had completely burned myself out. And she said to me, Megan, it’s not cool the way that you are running yourself into the ground. It’s not cool. It’s not admirable. And, yeah, it’s common, but it’s definitely not normal. And this is just a story in your head that you have to push yourself every single day to the brink, and you’re like this single mom that’s just killing yourself, essentially, in pursuit of both success and also being a single mom.

And I was really mad at her at the time for saying, but I’m so grateful that she did, because she was right. I think that we are just in this society where, especially as moms, we are told this story, and then we continue to tell ourselves this story, that we have to run ourselves into the ground for our families and for our careers. And there’s a lot of things that you can do, of course, to manage your stress, and there’s a lot of things you can do to increase your capacity for stress. And I think you talk a lot about those things on this podcast. But one thing that I would like to offer is that our bodies also have what I like to I picture it in my mind as a stress bucket, and I literally picture a bucket inside my body when I’m thinking about this. But everyone’s stress bucket looks a little different based on genetics, environmental factors, our history, our trauma.

But the point is that we all have this bucket, and we can fill that bucket with life stressors, and the body will be able to handle whatever fits in that bucket. Because we weren’t made to not experience stress, our bodies are well equipped to handle stress. But when that bucket overflows, the body is never really able to deactivate its stress response. And so, while a normal stress response involves the rise and fall of cortisol and adrenaline, chronic stress means that the body stress response remains activated at all time, and that cortisol and adrenaline just remains activated. And I don’t know about you, but I’m at a point now where I feel connected enough with my body that it’s like I know immediately that bucket is overflowing. I need to check myself. And this overflowing can cause damage to the blood vessels, increased risk of heart attack and stroke. It can lead to high blood sugar levels. If you’ve ever been wearing a continuous glucose monitor and you have a stressful part of the day, you watch your blood sugar spike, insulin resistance, hormonal imbalances, I mean, you name it.

This stress response bleeds over into all those other pillars that I was talking about, too. It disrupts your sleep. It can cause imbalanced, gut microbiome, increased cravings, all of those things. So I’d like to think about how all these stressors that are in our bucket, we can start to pull some of those out. And so, yes, it is important to have those stress management tools and being able to increase our capacity for stress. But just take a look at that bucket and actually I will tell clients, just start listing things out, like, what are all the things in your life that are causing stress? And that could be not just the perceived stress, but also physical stress on our bodies. So 16 plus hours of intermittent fasting, high intensity interval workouts. Ketogenic diet, just eating really low carb, doing boot camp style classes five days a week. Under sleeping. Maybe you need to set a boundary. Maybe it’s turning off the news. Maybe it’s turning off notifications on your phone. That’s my personal favorite. Maybe it’s a relationship that’s got to go.

But what are some of those low hanging fruit that you can just pull right out of the bucket? And some of those stressors, maybe quote unquote, healthy stressors. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with high intensity interval training. But maybe this is a period in your life where you’re under a lot of stress at work and you’ve got a lot of family stress and financial stress, and waking up every morning and doing a fasted, high intensity interval workout is not serving your body well at all. So what can you actually just start by pulling out of that bucket and then from there?

I think blood sugar is where we typically start, just because I think if you can manage your blood sugar, first of all, you can just feel so good. You mentioned like, feeling like you could run through a wall. It’s pretty crazy what can happen when you start fueling your body and just balancing your blood sugar. And then I think, when you talk about managing blood sugar. So just to give a quick example of what this looks like, I’m always encouraging clients. Number one, make sure you’re eating protein at every meal. And I like 30 grams. Sometimes we have to start a little lower, especially with clients that have never paid attention to protein in their life. And they’re eating like zero to maybe ten to 15 grams of protein at a meal. So we might start with 20, but my goal is 30. And if you’re perimenopausal or menopausal, I’m wanting you in that 40 grams range probably per meal. And protein is going to keep you full. It’s going to keep you satiated. It’s going to help maintain and build muscle tissue, which is super important.

And then making sure you’re including some healthy fat. Because with blood sugar, our blood sugar rises, typically with carbohydrates, that’s what’s going to cause the blood sugar to rise. But when we include fat and when we include fiber at our meals, that’s actually going to lower the blood sugar response. So it’s not that we can’t eat carbs, we want to eat carbs. But you can eat carbs with protein, fat, and fiber. And. It’s going to help lower the blood sugar impact.

So I love to just start with breakfast if this is something that you’re like. I have no clue how to manage my blood sugar. There’s nothing I’ve ever looked at before. Just starting with breakfast and thinking like, what is like 20 to 30 grams of protein at breakfast look like? High quality protein powder is great. I think smoothies are so just quick and easy and you can pack so much nutrition into them. Eggs, chicken, sausage. I am not a big breakfast eater, so I’ll just eat regular, like lunch or dinner foods for breakfast. You can do that too. You’re allowed to do that to manage your blood sugar, but really hitting the body hard with lots of protein in the morning and keeping your blood sugar steady throughout the morning, what that’s going to do? And the reason it’s so important at breakfast is because it’s going to set the stage for your blood sugar all day long.

If you start your day with a banana and a, I don’t know, coffee with skim milk, you’re immediately going to hit your body with a lot of sugar that’s going to cause a spike. And that spike is going to eventually cause a crash, which is going to make you crave more sugar because your brain is going to be like, oh my gosh, we have to bring blood sugar back up. It’s crashing, need more sugar. And then you’re going to reach for, I don’t know, the pretzels at the office. You’re going to be a lot more likely to order something at lunch that you maybe wouldn’t normally order. Something that’s higher in carbs because you’re going to be craving it and it’s going to start this blood sugar roller coaster all day. So if we can just start with breakfast in the morning, you’re automatically going to make better choices throughout your day.

And then when it comes to muscle, muscle is pretty simple. Lift weights. And I like to start with two times a week, if you’ve never lifted weights before, and then work your way up to three or four times a week and really focusing on even if weightlifting is not your thing. And I really highly encourage you to try it, because I think it really is the most effective way to build muscle. But even just starting out, spending any amount of time with your muscles under tension can help to start building muscle mass and then movement.

When it comes to movement, we can talk about steps, but I don’t think that’s as interesting. We all know that we should probably be moving more. I think when it comes to movement, what I am really passionate about is the more we move now, so I’m 37, so the more I move at age 37, the more I’m going to be able to move at age 67. And when we look at as we age, we generally think it becomes more difficult to manage our weight, right? And there’s a number of reasons for that. Of course we’re losing muscle mass. Women, we’re going through menopause and we’re losing muscle mass at a pretty high rate. Our hormones can get wacky. But overall, it’s because we’re losing muscle mass and it’s because our bodies just can’t move the way that it used to. How can you exercise if you’re not moving as well because you have pain or because your joints are stiff and you can’t even touch your toes?

So that’s why really focusing on getting a variety of movement and stretching and doing mobility work and walking and just moving in any way, shape or form when you’re in your 30s or your 20s or your 40s, whatever. You can start at any time is so incredibly important because you want to be able to continue to move as you age, so you can take care of your metabolic health as you age.

And then when it comes to sleep, yes, sleep in general impacts your metabolic health. But I think what’s more interesting to talk about is how much sleep impacts what you’re eating on a daily basis. So you might have your blood sugar control down. Like you might be a master, you might be working out every single day, moving. You might even have your stress under control. Although I would imagine if you’re under sleeping, you probably don’t. But when you sleep at night, you’re actually regenerating your hunger and satiety hormones. And we know at least that getting less than 5 hours of sleep, which is pretty major sleep deprivation, but getting less than 5 hours of sleep increases your hunger hormone ghrelin 15% and it decreases satiety hormone leptin by 15%. So knowing this, it makes sense that when we’re sleep deprived, we tend to eat around I want to say I think it’s like 300 calories more the following day. And there’s been a couple of studies that have come out about this which is really interesting. And we also know that the emotional center of the brain, the amygdala, lights up in response to really pleasurable foods when we’re sleep deprived. And the prefrontal cortex, which is typically responsible for our good decision making, is impaired with lack of sleep. And these studies, you can just go on with them. I think their sleep studies are so interesting.

But undersleeping is really giving your body a permission to overeat. And not just overeat, but overeat, like highly palatable foods. You’re generally not like, man, I could really use another chicken breast on 5 hours of sleep. So this is one that we focus on a lot. And I think everyone listening to this knows. They know that sleep is important. They know that undersleeping can cause weight gain or weight loss resistance. But it’s just one that we keep ignoring. And so I wanted to highlight it just one more time. Sleep makes such a massive impact.

And then finally gut health. And I think we all understand at this point the importance of having a healthy gut, and an entire encyclopedia could be written on this. But when it comes to weight in general and just metabolic health, I like to focus on gut health and how it impacts our inflammation in particular. That’s typically what I’m looking at because if you have inflammation at the gut, which is usually caused by a microbial imbalance, then it can lead to leaky gut. And then when you have leaky gut, you can have just system wide inflammation. And when the body is inflamed all the time, that’s the body’s number one priority is to put out that inflammation fire. So it’s not going to be concerned with weight loss.

And again, going back to when I’m working with clients, when we’re working with clients one on one and looking at their labs, going back to stress, but also inflammation is probably the leading cause of weight loss resistance. And when we start to take care of the inflammation, the weight will just start to come right off.

And of course, gut health is extremely complex and I think it can be really helpful to work with a functional practitioner. But there’s also so many steps you can take at home, starting with eliminating anything that’s causing the problem. And I know that can be a little tricky, but starting with just processed foods, I think we just can’t go wrong there. And then bringing in you want to eliminate anything that’s causing the damage. And then I think oftentimes the first step that we take is, okay, let’s add the good bacteria back, let’s do a probiotic, let’s do the fermented foods, and that’s great, but we also have to heal the gut lining. So that second step is actually healing the gut lining. And bone broth, collagen, gelatin are all fantastic. I love the product Gut Fortify from Just Thrive, and I know that you’re a fan of that brand as well, so I’ll bring that one in too. And then of course, the third step is actually bringing in healthy bacteria, whether it’s with a probiotic, fermented foods, and then feeding those healthy bacteria with fiber, which we’re getting at every meal anyways while we’re controlling our blood sugar.

Katie: So many good points in that answer. And I’ve been making notes in the show notes for you guys listening along with some links to your work because I know you have a tremendous amount of additional reading people can do on this topic as well as a book, which we’re going to get into in a minute.

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I really want to highlight something you said which I think especially impacts women, which is this idea of self-care and giving the body what it needs. And I feel like this often gets lost in the conversation of like bubble baths or chocolate. And really what it is to me, I’m learning more and more is fuel and sleep and things like light that are free and getting that morning sunlight, going for a walk with your kids, getting enough sleep at night. And so for me, I’ve even built boundaries as a mom around those things so that I can model them for my kids, too.

And with teenagers now, I sometimes go to bed before they do because they have the ability to sleep in in the morning. And I’m a big fan of them getting enough sleep and realizing teenagers sleep schedules can tend to the later side anyway. But they see me exercise the boundary of I love you guys, I’m going to hug and kiss you and I’m going to go to sleep at 9:00, even if you guys are going to stay up, I’m going to sleep. And to me, those are the really impactful forms of self care which are actually giving the body what it needs, those foundational things that really are free. Sleep is free. Light in the morning is free. If we’re going to eat food anyway, choosing really nutrient dense foods doesn’t actually have to cost anymore. And when we get those foundational things right, then all these other things that we can do to try to address the more nuanced things I feel like become much more effective anyway.

And I think for women especially, there’s a lot of freedom in understanding that often when we nourish our bodies better and we eat more food and the right kinds of food, we still can actually lose weight. But our body is in such a happier state. And addressing that stress point, which to your point that you made so well, is not just the feeling of mental stress, which we of course all experience, but what are the things my body perceives as stress. And I love the bucket analogy of what things is my body putting in this bucket that I may not even be addressing and what can I take out that will help address that overflow?

It seems like a lot of this also touches on mindset. And I know that you talked about this already quite a bit, but I would love to address any additional mindset points because I know firsthand from my own experience, that addressing trauma and dealing with my mindset was actually one of the most impactful things I did for my physical health. And it was one that I resisted for a long time because it felt uncomfortable.

Megan: Yeah, well, I like to think of weight loss. I really think that it’s an art and a science. And of course, I just walked through the science with you, but the art is really you and it’s your mindset, it’s your thoughts, it’s the beliefs that you have about yourself. One of the most impactful models that I’ve ever learned, I learned about this model a few years ago. It was Robert Diltz’s logical levels of change. It’s just one of those things that you learn and then you just can’t unlearn. And it completely changed my life. And now I use it with my clients a lot and I go into a lot of depth in the book.

But I’ll give you an overview, really, and it looks at when we go to change our behavior, the first thing that we do or excuse me, when we set a goal, let’s look at it this way. When we go to set a goal, the first thing we do is we change our behavior, right? We’re like, okay, well, I’m going to change my behavior, and I’m going to change my environment. I’m going to get a gym membership. I’m going to clean out my pantry. I’m going to go work out four times a week. I’m going to eat X amount of calories. Whatever we decide to do, and that works for a while until our willpower takes over, or our willpower fails us, and we just decide, this isn’t something that I want to do anymore.

And I mentioned this earlier. It’s like when you are being told what to do, even if you’re telling yourself, like, I need to eat X amount of calories, or I need to eat this at lunch or dinner. And you get to the point and you’re like, I don’t actually want to do this. I want to eat something else. It’s pretty easy for you to just say, okay, I’m just going to eat something else. I don’t have any reason not to. And what the model shows is that while behavior and environment are really important, it’s not the place you want to start. Because on any given day, those things can change. If you move up this, it’s a pyramid. And if you move up this pyramid above that is knowledge and skills. And so the point is that when it comes to a goal and trying to achieve a goal, you have to understand it. You have to have knowledge around it. You have to have education around it.

And when I learned this, I thought, oh my gosh, this is why the way that I’ve been teaching weight loss for all these years has been so effective. Because I’m not telling. I’m teaching. And so they’re learning and they’re able to make their own decisions about food and about their body. And then once you go up the pyramid a little bit more, you get into beliefs and identity and how your beliefs shape your behavior and your beliefs really shape your environment as well. And identity is kind of like this. I am level. I am a dietitian.

So that’s what an identity is. That’s a part of my identity and how your identity impacts your behaviors and in your environment and ultimately impacts your results. So the way that I teach this is we got to start up at the top. We got to start with our identity, and we’ve got to start with our beliefs. If you have a belief that you are a self-sabotager and that you don’t follow through on promises to yourself and that you’re a failure. Guess what? It doesn’t matter how many behaviors you’ve set for yourself to achieve a certain goal. You will eventually go back to self-sabotaging and you will eventually fail because it’s something that’s just embedded in your subconscious. And our subconscious really is driving, I would say, a minimum of 95% of the decisions that we’re making every day. Our life, everything that surrounds us is really driven by our subconscious mind.

And so again, I’ll go back to if your subconscious is telling you that you are a self sabotager, you’re going to continue to self sabotage over and over and over again. And you have the evidence for that, probably. That’s where our beliefs come from.

And so to start there, what I really like to do, I’m actually give you an action step here. I really like to think about, okay, where do I want to be in a year? And if a year is too far out, a week, it doesn’t matter. So you just go out somewhere in the future. Where do I want to be? What goal do I have? What do I want for my body? How do I want it to feel, what I want it to look like? And then putting myself in that place, putting myself in that body. Who is that version of me? What do they do? What do they do in the morning when they wake up? How do they feel? How do they talk to themselves? What do they eat for breakfast? And figuring out just who that person is because it’s going to be a different person than you right now. It has to be, right. And creating mantras around that.

Mantras are so unbelievably simple and they almost seem like they’re too easy. And they are if you don’t actually do them. That’s the key. You have to actually do the mantras. But creating mantras around who you want to be and who that person is so I’m a person that goes to the gym four times a week. I’m that kind of a person. I’m that person that regularly works out. I’m a person who prioritizes breakfast every day. I’m a person who feels really good in their clothes and who invests in clothes that make them feel good. I don’t care what it is. I’m just riffing right now. But having those mantras and actually repeating them over and over again every day, however that looks like for you, I like to set reminders on my phone to do it. And then I just have a habit of have a sticky note in my car that reminds me when I get into my car, do my mantras. This is how you will begin to reprogram those subconscious beliefs that could very easily be what’s holding you back from following through on promises that you make to yourself over and over and over again. And it really just starts with you got to be intentional about it, but it starts with actually thinking about what do I want my life to look like? Who do I want to be writing that down and then repeating it over and over again. So that’s just one little tactic that I use. But I think it’s really effective and again, it’s free.

Katie: I love everything you just said, and I would guess a lot of people listening maybe are definitely resonating with certain things that you’ve said and hopefully seeing some patterns and things that will be helpful to them. I would guess there are also people listening who have been on the struggle like I was for many, many years and had undereaten and sort of chronically deprived my body for a long time. And I know sort of first hand from experience, probably the longer you’ve done that, the more grace to give yourself in the recovery process of that and sort of rebuilding the healthy metabolism aspects that we’ve talked about. But I would love if there’s any specific advice for people who have maybe gone a decade of dieting or in some of those phases that are especially helpful in that process of rehabilitating.

Megan: Yeah, well, the first thing is you want to focus on, again, all these six pillars that I talk about. But what’s really important is that you don’t do all six at once and that you don’t sit and write down all these different behaviors that you’re going to start implementing into your life. Okay, I’m going to balance my blood sugar. I’m going to do this for breakfast. I’m going to work out four times a week. I’m going to go on a 20 minutes walk every day. I’m going to go to sleep at 9:00 at night. Oftentimes when we try to do the most is typically when we end up doing the least.

And I think what’s most important for people who have been trying to lose weight for many, many years and are just kind of in this cycle of inconsistency is to just work on that consistency piece. Anything that we’ve talked about today is going to help you on your path to repairing your metabolic health. You can start wherever you want. I personally like to start with blood sugar just because I think it’s just, again, like that low hanging fruit. Once you start to balance your blood sugar, you’re going to feel so much better, you’re going to start sleeping better. You’re probably going to be able to manage your stress a little bit better. One of my favorite things to hear from people that just start with the blood sugar management piece is that they feel like they’re nicer, that their spouses or their kids comment like, mom, you’re in such a better mood, what are you doing? So I do think that that’s probably my favorite place to start.

But the point is to just start with one thing. I say this a lot, like just start with one thing. And I like to challenge both in my monthly program but also just my audience. I talk about this every month, like towards the end of the month as I ask my audience, what’s your focus for April? What’s your focus for May? What’s your focus for June? What’s the one little micro habit that you’re going to work on? And that microhabit is like, it is life.

Okay, so this month, for example, I personally am working on this and we’re doing it in my monthly program. Everyone is doing 20 minutes of zone two cardio a day. So basically we’re all going on a brisk walk every day. And that goes before making it to the gym, that goes before breath work. Whatever it is, whatever habits you have throughout the day, that is number one. Because it’s like we’re putting in the reps every day on that one habit. And we’re teaching ourselves that we do follow through on promises to ourselves. We are consistent, we’re not self sabotaging. We’re doing this every single day. And then next month we’ll switch the focus. And maybe you won’t necessarily do the 20 minute walk every single day, but maybe you’ll do it three or four times a week. It’s become a habit now and you’re prioritizing it, whereas last month you didn’t do it at all. So regardless of where you start, I think the process is a lot more important than what the actual habit is that you’re beginning with.

Katie: That makes sense. And I know there’s so much more than we can cover in a 1 hour podcast, but I know you also have a book on this topic that has a lot more in depth info and helps people with the six pillars very specifically and helping them figure out what they need to do. So maybe talk about the book for a minute. And also, I believe you also still work with clients, so if you can give us an overview of both of those.

Megan: Yeah, so the book actually it starts out with we actually have a quiz in there, so you can take the quiz and see, okay, where am I struggling the most? Where do I need to start? And the book is actually written to read from start to finish, and I do recommend doing that just because of the way that it’s put together. But from there you can actually decide, okay, where do I want to start? What area do I want to begin in? And we walk through each of the pillars. And the Mindset chapter is very important. I think it’s the most important chapter and then something that we didn’t even get into today.

The last chapter of the book I think is really important too, because it’s all about how to integrate what you’ve learned into your real life. I think something that most diet programs are missing. There’s a lot of things that diet programs are missing, but one that’s really important is that they don’t talk about weekends and holidays and vacation. And what do you do if you actually broke down your week and you went from like Friday at 5:00pm to Sunday at midnight? I’m going to say this wrong, it’s 30% to 35% of your week regardless. It’s about a third of your week. So if you’re going off the rails every weekend, or maybe you’re not even going off the rails, but you’re just like, I’m not going to do my normal routine this week. I’m going to eat however I want or do whatever I want on the weekends. And you’re not seeing progress. That’s a very good reason why.

So we talk about it and we talk about what to do when you find yourself in a situation where, yeah, maybe you don’t want to eat protein, healthy fat and fiber at this meal. Maybe you want to eat a big bowl of pasta, you want to have like ice cream for dinner, I don’t know, whatever it is. Well, how do you do that and then make the next best choice afterwards? How do you do that and not then go off the rails for the rest of the weekend or the rest of your vacation and really go into making that next best choice? And what does that look like? Is that just going for a walk or making sure that you’re planning a protein rich meal at your next meal? There’s never any reason at all to, as I say, fall off the wagon. You can just keep going. And I’m really asking yourself like, oh, what if I just keep going and what if I just make my next best choice at the next meal?

And so that’s the book and within my practice we have a 30 day program that really mimics this. The book and the program have similarities, but the program has a high level of accountability, support of a team of dietitians. So I think they’re actually very complementary of each other and you can start with one or the other and it also then after the 30 days rolls into a monthly program where we do these challenges every month like we’re doing right now. And we have dietitians who come in and do coaching calls every week. We center the program a lot around mindset that we talked about today and then we also have a one on one coaching as well. If we really need to either dive in and take a look at your labs or if you just need a really high level of accountability and support.

Katie: I will make sure all of those are linked in the show notes. For any of you guys that are listening while you’re on the go, whether driving or walking or whatever it is, and a couple of questions I love to ask at the end of interviews. The first being if there’s a book or number of books that have profoundly impacted your life personally and if so, what they are and why.

Megan: Yeah, so I can think of two. This is funny because I struggle with finishing books and I think I have ADHD, I get about halfway through and then I’m like, okay, this is good enough, I’m going to move on. But there are two that I have read multiple times that went way back when I first started really changing my life and changing the way, number one, changing just my life in general and the way that I approached my life, but then also the way that I ran my business.

The one for my business and for nutrition was The Calorie Myth by Jonathan Baylor. That book blew my mind. This was right around the time when I started thinking like, oh my gosh, I’ve been lied to, nothing is real. And I was trying to figure out just how to approach food and nutrition in my own life, but also in my clients. And so that one was really good.

And then the second one that I was really working on, my confidence. At the time I had really low confidence. I had started a job. So this was before I was even seeing clients and I had my business, but I was starting a really challenging job with a startup and I wanted to try and build my confidence. And so I was probably just googled like confidence books. And I got you are a badass by Jen Cinchero thinking that this was going to be a book just about confidence, but it really introduced me to this idea of manifestation and the subconscious mind and this was all so brand new to me. I mean, again, blew my mind. I was like, whoa, I didn’t know any of this existed. And it started me down this rabbit hole that has just completely changed the trajectory of my life. So those are probably my two books and I will say too that I just started reading outlive by Dr. Peter Attia and I am already like halfway through the book so I think I will probably finish that one as well. It is incredible.

Katie: I love it. Well, those will all be linked in the show notes as well. And lastly, any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to everything we’ve talked about or entirely unrelated?

Megan: Yeah, I would just say that I really love the message that your body is not at war with you. And I think we think this so often that whether we can’t see weight loss or we can’t get our body to, I guess, bend to our will, that it’s at war with us. We say things like, oh, my body hates me and they couldn’t be further from the truth. Weight loss resistance, pain, GI issues, depression, anxiety, fatigue, you name it, these are just not ways that the body. Is rebelling against you. It’s really just your body talking to you. So instead of having this mindset that your body won’t bend at your will, just start by loving on it and just giving it a little more nourishing. It thinking about those foundational pillars we talked about today and start incorporating them one by one. And I think you’ll be pretty amazed at what your body will actually do for you.

Katie: That’s a perfect place to wrap up this conversation. You are phenomenal. This has been such a helpful and wonderful conversation and I’m a big fan of your work and your new book. So definitely encourage you guys check that out. But Megan, thank you so much for being here today. This has been fun.

Megan: Yeah. Thanks, Katie.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.