Breaking Your Weight Loss Plateau

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Welcome to the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Swisher, certified personal trainer, nutritionist, hormone, health expert and girl mom, I believe all women should be able to understand how our bodies are designed to feel. And I teach you how to sync your lifestyle to your cycle to reach maximum energy. You deserve to feel your best. And this podcast is going to teach you how. Let’s dive in!

This podcast is sponsored by the SYNC Digital Course, to take the free hormone imbalance quiz to see what your symptoms could mean about your health. Visit sync.jennyswisher.com. That’s sync s y n c dot Jenny swisher.com.

Welcome friends to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. Today we are talking all about weight gain. I know that this is a common question that I get. It’s also something that a lot of women struggle with. So I wanted to make sure that we took some time today to really dive in. And to talk about what could be preventing you from breaking a weight loss plateau. A lot of times women will come to me and they’ll say I’m doing all the things right, but nothing seems to work. In fact, I have a story about this that I think might relate, I used to own a fitness studio, my husband and I owned it together, we had it for about a handful of years. And the way that our program worked at the studio was we would enroll people in 90 straight days of full body transformation. So in other words, people would commit to coming in six days a week for personal training in a small group setting. I had men I had women, I had a lot of different physical ability levels, different ages. And it was interesting, because over the course of time, what I started to notice was that there was a difference between the results that the men would get in 90 days versus the results that the women would get in a lot of cases. Now it’s not always the case, right? Like sometimes, we had amazing results for all parties. But we did have some instances where men especially they would come in and they would do the training for six days a week, but they wouldn’t always follow the nutrition plan, right? Like they would just sort of, I would call it 50/50. Right, we would call that sort of like a, I don’t know, half arse situation, they would come in and say Oh, I’m kind of following the meal plan. But I also kind of eat whatever my wife cooks, whereas the women would come into the gym six days a week as well and train. And they were following the meal plan to a T. And yet they couldn’t seem to get their belly fat or their hips and thighs to really trim down and toned up. So a lot of times women would come to me and they would say what’s going on, I’m doing all the things I’m following the program. I’m coming in six days a week, I’m exercising, I’m eating right and the weight isn’t budging. And this became sort of my personal mission to figure out what’s going on. Like, why is there such a difference between the way men and women train and the results that they get. Now at the same time, I was experiencing my own journey. Some of you guys know that over the course of time, I’ve dropped 35 pounds in my fitness journey. But I was also struggling with things like chronic migraine and I was starting my journey of really understanding women’s hormones. So I started to make this connection between the fact that the only thing in my mind that could be preventing women from seeing results had to be their hormones, it’s the only thing that really differentiates us from men. And so that’s when I started to get really interested in hormone health at a different level. And I really started to follow a lot of different experts in the world of cycle syncing and understanding the female physiology as it pertains to fitness. And that’s when my eyes were opened to this idea that everything we’ve been doing from a personal training perspective, or just fitness in general, has been catered to the science of male physiology. So until about a decade ago, all of the research done on things like intermittent fasting and different styles of Personal Training and Fitness regimens were done on men. And when researchers were asked, Why don’t you research women? Their answer was women’s bodies are too complex. And what they meant by that was their hormone systems, right? A man is predictable. His hormones are a constant, they do not ebb and flow. There’s no ovulation there’s no menstruation, right? A female is a little bit more and I’ll put air quotes complicated. So because of that all of these different things that we follow regarding muscle confusion training, or HIIT training, or strength training, a lot of the regimens that have been built have been built for men. Likewise, nutritional differences occur as well. So you know, obviously, you know, biologically men require more calories, but it’s not just a calories in calories out scenario. For women, in fact, this has been a personal pet peeve of mine. I’ve met multiple personal trainers, I will say most of them were men who told me no, no, you can’t there’s there’s no arguing it’s all about calories in and calories out. And I said, No, no, you don’t understand, I have worked with clients where that is that not the case, they’re following their macros, they’re following the nutrition plan, and they’re not seeing results. So it all comes back to this idea of hormonal imbalance. If you are dealing with some sort of underlying hormonal imbalance, it could be causing your body to hold on to that extra weight and to not drop the pounds. So in previous episodes, I’ve talked about this concept of the four legged chair, right, I’ve talked about how we have our thyroid, our cortisol, stress response, our sex hormones in our blood sugar, if any of those are out of balance in some way, it can actually be causing the whole chair to shift and wobble. And when that’s happening underneath the surface, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing as far as eating a salad every day, or exercising every day. If there’s something functionally wrong, and your endocrine system, if something is off, your body is not going to break that plateau. And so that’s why I’ve become so passionate about teaching women how to get to the root cause of what’s going on for themselves with their hormones, because that really is step one, to creating a long term sustainable plan that will help you see results and keep them. So I just want to kind of dive into a couple of things that I think are important to say here. And I some of this is going to be redundant for those of you guys who have listened to the podcast before, but I still think it’s so worth covering.

Number one, if you’re not currently doing testing on your hormones, at least every year, I want you to start doing that right now. If you’re going to your doctor or your OBGYN, and you’re asking for testing, and they tell you it’s unnecessary, or they tell you it’s just part of aging, or your maybe your period menopausal, I’m sorry, if it were me, I would not accept that as an answer. And I would be looking for a new doctor or at least a second opinion, sorry, but not sorry. A lot of times that has to be that that’s just the way it is. So when it looks when you’re looking at, you know, annual blood work, that’s one thing but also investing in something like a Dutch test, which is a urine test that you can do from home, there’s it’s a home kit that you get delivered to your door or something like that, doing it annually to really get a baseline for your hormones. And of course, getting that annual bloodwork is going to help you have sort of a benchmark to compare to as you start to look at your hormones, like what’s happening over the course of time are certain things dropping, or certain things falling are certain things rising. But don’t be afraid to say I need a new doctor, or I’ve got to make the effort to find someone new who will work with me on this. You know, as we age, as women, our adrenal glands start to take over for our sex hormone production, our ovaries start to produce less. And this can often lead to various symptoms, right like weight gain in the belly, or in the hips and thighs. A lot of times I’ll hear women complain about sleep issues, they either can’t fall asleep, or they can’t stay asleep, or they wake up in the morning feeling jittery, headaches, low energy, low libido, all of those things are uncomfortable signs that something is off with your hormones. But here’s the thing. In my experience, most women who feel that way who are having those types of symptoms, all they do is they just start to work out harder, and restrict their food intake even more. If I had $1. For every woman who said, you know, I think I just need to level it up. You know, the thing I’ve heard most often is I’m going to start to do 75 hard. And I’m going to do two workouts a day. And I’m going to cut back on my food. In fact, Sister that’s not working to your advantage, because the more you work out, the more strain you’re putting on those adrenals. And so you’re putting your body into a state of fight or flight. When your body goes into fight or flight, guess what it values, survival, evaluates survival over reproduction. So that’s when you’re going to start to see your cycles get out of whack, you’re going to start to see more headaches, more sleep issues, you’re just contributing to the problem. By working out harder, it’s all about working out smarter, and working out in alignment with the phases and the energies of your cycle, which I’ll talk about in just a second. Same thing goes for restricting your food intake. If you start to cut back on food, the same thing happens your body goes into a state of fight or flight, it thinks maybe that it’s starving or that you’re not giving it enough nourishment, and so it starts to hold on to the weight. The most common sign of weight gain that I’ve seen, at least with my clients thus far has been related to estrogen dominance. Estrogen dominance is the ratio of your progesterone to estrogen. And so it has really nothing to do with how high your estrogen is. It’s just all about that ratio between the two. How high is it in relation to your progesterone? Most women that I’m working with right now, I’m seeing this across the board. They’re progesterone numbers, whether it’s related to them being on birth control for several years, or whatever is not high enough. Something like a bioidentical hormone replacement cream, like progesterone cream could be a game changer. It was for me, I did home fitness programs, I tweaked my nutrition. But it wasn’t until I started to use this cream and to supplement my body with what it was missing, that I started to see weight loss and that I started to feel energy again. So if you are living in a state of estrogen dominance, that could mean you’re seeing any of the symptoms that I just mentioned, or maybe even weight gain and those hips and thighs, it could be that you’re dealing with this concept of estrogen dominance, there is a solution for women that are in this situation. And it really revolves around proper supplementation. So I mentioned bioidentical hormone therapy, there’s also things like estrogen detoxifiers for the liver, and lots of other types of supplements from a natural path that can help you sort of eliminate this excess estrogen and start to see results when it comes to your weight. So I have a few tips for you that I want to mention. I’ve talked about, you know, finding a practitioner who knows and understands hormone systems, who knows and understands and can interpret things like the Dutch test and urine testing, getting the proper testing for yourself, supplementing your body according to those results.

And then finally, you know, cycle syncing your nutrition and your fitness with your phases of your cycle. So we’ve talked about this in depth on previous podcasts, so I won’t go too far into detail. But for each week of your cycle, for each phase, you have different energies, right? Like your sleep is going to vary depending on that energy, your mood is going to vary as well. So figuring out a plan for yourself as far as understanding what workouts are going to be appropriate for you, or what workouts are going to going to really fuel your results, for example, strength training during the follicular phase of your cycle to really maximize that estrogen, and to build muscle, whereas doing more hit style training and cardio training in the second half of your cycle, when progesterone is at play for your metabolism. Understanding those things and like I said before working out smarter, not harder. Could that’s you working with your physiology, that’s you working in alignment with your female body, as opposed to just pounding the pavement, or, you know, pressing play on your home workout and just drilling your body day after day and putting it into a fight or flight mode. You’re not serving yourself by doing that. This is a great place to pause and just say that if you haven’t taken advantage of my free hormone imbalance quiz, it can definitely help you get least get a baseline of what could be going on for you so that you know what questions to take to your doctor. Now there are some other things that could be at play. I would say most of the time, what I see is estrogen dominance. I think it’s very common, especially given the estrogenic things in our environment, right things like plastic bottles, things that we’re consuming that were around that contribute to that estrogen toxicity. I think that estrogen dominance is a huge problem that most women are not aware of. But there are other things at play too. There are things like your blood sugar. A lot of experts in this field say that your blood sugar is the number one hormone to be paying attention to. And I could not agree more. You should never underestimate the power of blood sugar in the grand scheme of your Hormonal Health. Okay, when it’s fluctuating, you can find excess weight in your lower belly, you can start to notice that oh my gosh, like a couple hours after I eat, I start to feel like I’m crashing my energy drops or I start to feel like I’m starving, or I’m going to pass out. I’ve dealt with this myself. And so it wasn’t until I realized this is my blood sugar, aka This is my body trying to alert me that it needs more fuel, especially in the form of protein and healthy fat. A lot of women will say, Oh, I have a granola bar for breakfast. Well, how do you feel two hours later? Oh, I feel like crap. I feel like I’m crashing. Okay, well, then what? Well, then I have, you know, a piece of toast with peanut butter. Okay, well, you’re giving yourself a little bit of healthy fat there, but you’re also consuming another carbohydrate. So you’re fluctuating your body throughout the day with carbohydrates, as opposed to really fueling it with lean meats, hard boiled eggs, healthy nut butters, avocado, olive oil, fats, and proteins are going to keep you satiated. And they’re also going to help level out your blood sugar so that you’re not having those fluctuations. When women come to me and they say my doctor just diagnosed me with PCOS. What do I do? Right, I say we have got to first tackle your blood sugar. Your blood sugar is the key to your PCOS. So getting you know getting yourself satiated focusing on your nutrition. Tackling that blood sugar so that it can become stable is going to help that hormone chair get into balance and stay in balance.

Number three on the list. So we have estrogen dominance. We have blood sugar fluctuations, number three, but definitely not number three. Sometimes it’s number one for a lot of people is cortisol, AKA your stress response. So again, our adrenal glands start to start to take up more of the sex hormone production over time. Cortisol is there for your fight or flight right it’s there for your survival. And so Again, if you’re putting yourself into extremely hard fitness regimens, or you are not eating enough, especially as it pertains to, maybe you’re exercising hard and you’re not eating enough, or in some cases, women who aren’t exercising still aren’t eating enough, and they’re not eating enough of the right foods, it can put you into a state of what we call LEA, which stands for Low energy availability. This can be a result of high intensity training and just not feeling enough. And again, it puts your body into fight or flight. So of course, your body is going to value survival over reproduction. I’d like I said before, so really finding a way to level out our stress. And I know for women like me, women who like to exercise sometimes that means scaling back a little bit. You don’t always have to be doing the hit workout every day, you don’t always have to be doing a 10 mile run, you don’t always have to be doing intense strength training your body requires rest. It also requires variability in your training in alignment with your cycle.

Number four on the list, which can contribute to sometimes some weight gain for women, or this you know idea of not being able to break their weight loss plateau is of course perimenopause, and menopause. It goes without saying that into our 40s and 50s. And sometimes for myself included even in our 30s, we can start to see our progesterone decline, which causes estrogen dominance, and then even cortisol issues can arise too. So here’s the thing. I think a lot of women think that menopause means that your estrogen is dropping, and that is the case. But there’s about a 10 year period for most women that happens before that, this perimenopausal time, we’re actually our estrogen isn’t dropping at all. But our progesterone is dropping, which comes back to what we just talked about with estrogen dominance. And because we have this big gap, and because that ratio is off, our body tends to hold on to fat. It’s why you hear women who are in their 30s and 40s. Say, oh, my gosh, I’m doing all the things I did in my 20s. And it’s not working, right, I’m running the half marathons again, or I’m training with my personal trainer, and I’m not seeing results. It’s because your body is changing. Your body is now becoming progesterone deficient. And now you’re just training harder and harder and harder. And trust me there is a connection there between how your cortisol can sometimes steal from your sex hormones, how that stress response is involved. So perimenopause, and menopause can kind of throw things off for women. I think that goes without saying I think a lot of women are aware of that. But getting the right doctor and getting the right testing and understand that that’s what’s going on for you. And then getting that supplementation that I mentioned previously, could be all the difference for you could be all the difference for you.

And then finally, number five, sluggish thyroid. So if thyroid is an issue for you, especially if it’s underperforming, it’s undoubtedly causing issues with your weight. So understanding what’s going on for you here is crucial. Again, the thyroid is one of those four legs of the hormone chair. So sometimes it’s the primary cause sometimes it’s the primary weak leg, sometimes it’s just involved, right? If something else is out of balance, it can get involved. So working with the right practitioner getting on the right medications, or supplementations can really be a difference maker. So you don’t have to suffer from weight gain without help. I just this is a huge thing that I’m passionate about. I see so many women out there who are just literally like beating themselves into the ground with workouts and diet culture, right, this whole idea of salads every day and fasting and things that aren’t working for them. By the way side note, intermittent fasting is in the same boat, as most fitness training, right? Like it’s all it’s only been studied on men. And it can tend to be a very powerful weight loss tool for men. That does not mean that it is a powerful weight loss tool for women. If we think about it in the terms of what we’ve been talking about today, with your cortisol response and your fight or flight. If we are intermittent fasting, if we are going too long without nourishment, as a female, our body again goes into that fight or flight mode. And when that happens, we hold on to all that extra weight because our cortisol is out of balance. And guess what we hold on to the fat because our body is valuing what? Survival over reproduction. And it’s valuing survival over your weight loss results and your physique. So you really have to get a hold of what’s happening in your body. And it’s not just about your menstrual cycle. It’s about all these other pieces, your blood sugar, your thyroid, your stress response, but it’s up to you to feel good again, I don’t think people realize that like, it’s not up to anybody else to get you feeling better, but you and so if your doctor is looking at you and saying, Oh, this is just part of aging or sounds like you’re entering perimenopause, or I don’t know like everything’s in the normal ranges, maybe you need to seek out a functional medicine doctor, take my sink digital course understand and become hormone literate about your body and confident in knowing what you need to be Asking about and knowing how to advocate for yourself, and really start to find this joy and find this sense of energy. I measure everything and energy, right. And so if your energy is off, girl, you got to do something about it. And it is up to you to do something about it. You deserve to feel good. Again, I’m here for you along the way. If you have any questions for me, of course, reach out as usual. But I hope this is a powerful message for you. If you’re someone listening, and you’re thinking, I do all the things and I can’t get my weight to budge. I’m here to kind of raise my hand and say, hey, it’s time to look at your hormones, it’s time to pay attention to that check engine light that’s flashing. If we can’t get to the root cause of it. Nothing you’re doing on the surface is going to give you results. So I hope this has been helpful for you today. Share it on your social media, tag me tag sync your life and I will talk to you guys next week. Have a great day guys.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the SYNC Your Life Podcast. I hope you found value from today’s episode. If you did, please share it out to your friends or leave a review. Remember your cycles are your superpower and by aligning with them, you can live your life with all the energy you need to be a mom, Wife, Daughter and friends of those you love. Until next time!