Stop Being Confused About Health, Boost Your Metabolism, Energy, and Eat More Carbs
Welcome to the Satiated Podcast, where we explore physical and emotional hunger, satiation and healing your relationship with your food and body. I'm your host, Stephanie Mara Fox, your Somatic Nutritional Counselor.
Raise your hand if you're tired of all the how much protein you "should" be eating that's out there? I really hope I'm not the only one raising my hand right now. Ok, is protein important to eat? Absolutely! It is a crucial macronutrient to have at most meals, especially when you're struggling with food, as it can also feel emotionally grounding. But, the issue with solely focusing on one macronutrient is that it doesn't take into account the balance of other nutrients your body needs to thrive. I sense that for many in the nutritional field, they are expressing more and more how much nutrition needs to be individualized based on your body, the context of your life, your age, and what you're navigating. Rarely are there blanket suggestions of what is going to work for every single person's body. After I found Kate Deering and how she approached nutrition, I knew I needed to bring her on the podcast and discuss all of this nuance more.
For over 30 years Kate has been involved in the health and fitness industry, helping men and women of all ages achieve optimal health and wellness. Her practice is based on a holistic approach to health by looking at the entirety of a person’s well-being. A person’s well-being includes diet, stress, exercise, posture, sleep, digestion, hormones, mind-set and lifestyle. She believes maintaining all of these key components is vital to a person’s overall health and happiness. She is the author of "How To Heal Your Metabolism" and is a world renowned nutrition coach, coaching 1000's of men and women all over the world. We chat about understanding energy production in the body, the role of carbohydrates and protein in health, the importance of individualized nutrition, reframing weight loss and health metrics, the impact of stress on the body, intermittent fasting pros and cons, and addressing fear around food.
Two notes before we dive in, one there is some static baked into the audio but you can still hear everything clearly and there are some suggestions given around tracking intake. If you're deep in food recovery, please take what works for you and don't worry about the rest. You get to meet yourself with where you're at and what is going to work for you in your food interactions. Now, welcome Kate! I am really, really excited to have you here today and to kind of, I feel like we're going to get into a conversation of just clarifying things for people and so I would love to first get started on how you got into the work that you're currently doing today.
Kate Deering 03:12
Thanks for having me, Stephanie. So I'm in a space what people reference, probably the pro metabolic space or the bioenergetic space, and it's a concept of basically, equate health with energy, or how well your cells are producing energy. And if you're actually doing that well, you have a well functioning metabolism. So energy, how well you produce energy is metabolism is working essentially. How I got into this is, I've been in the health nutrition space for 30 plus years. And 20 years into it, I started to have some health issues. I was getting into my late 30s, and I guess I thought maybe I'm just in perimenopause, or going into that time of my life, and but I started to not feel well, and I started to be more fatigued, and I just started having issues where I'm like, look, I've always been healthy. I've always done these right things. I've been a little extreme in my life, but I felt like I was hitting a wall and I didn't know how to get through it. And I'm sure a lot of women, probably in that time of their life, or are in that time of life, will go, yeah, that's me, too. And so what happened to me is I started to learn a different way of looking at health. I used to equate health with how lean or fit I was, and what I learned from an energy perspective, maybe it's more about I'm free of symptoms. I'm sleeping well. I have good digestion. I feel good all day. I'm happy I can actually eat to live, versus constantly feeling like I need to be lean. I don't have to diet down all the time, right? So that's how I started to look through health on a different perspective, which completely shifted how I ate, how I live, and realize maybe I wasn't doing it the right way. For a long time, I was doing it where I thought was best, but this kind of shifted me into a different way of thinking and kind of created this whole fire, energetic space.
Stephanie Mara 05:02
Yeah, thanks for sharing all that. I find that, yes, as we age as women, it gets so confusing, and there's so much mixed messages, and you were even saying before we press record, that there's so much noise out there that I find that a lot of women come to me to work with me, because sometimes they're so confused about what to eat, when to eat, how to eat, what's best for their bodies anymore, and they don't know who to trust totally.
Kate Deering 05:33
With the onset of social media, it's a big thing right now, because everybody's an expert, and they're all very convincing and so and they all have data and facts and studies to support their point of view, and so everyone does get confused. Well, maybe that's what I've been doing wrong, or that's what and again, I was the same person. I used to change my dietary approach every six months based on whatever the new fad or people were doing, and that shifted once I kind of realized, look, it's not inherently just about the food. It's how is my body's health right now? And how can I manage that? And how do I even know I'm improving without using weight as the major factor determine my health? And from this space, yeah, we use things like monitoring your body temperature, because heat production is a sign of health, monitoring your pulse, monitoring your sleep, your digestion, for women, your period, your cycle, if you're getting into perimenopause or menopause, how are you dealing with that afterwards? All those things are important. Symptoms tell us something about our health, and if you have a lot of them, then and even if you're lean, then we can assume that you might have some health issues.
Stephanie Mara 06:32
Yeah, so I'd love you to go into more description of what is this bioenergetic space. I know you're starting to describe it a little bit, but if you can go into more detail.
Kate Deering 06:43
So if you look through the lens I look through and I like to almost go down to, what do your cells need to produce energy? Because energy is life. If without energy, we can't have function, and we can't have structure of our body. So we go down to the fundamental like, well, we have 37 trillion cells. How do they produce energy when we look at that, well, they need certain things, they need a fuel source, they need certain nutrients. They need proper thyroid function, they need oxygen, they need vitamin D. And if any of those are lacking, then you might have an energy production issue. If you don't produce energy well, then you're going to suffer. You're going to feel tired, you're not going to be able to heal as well. You're not going to be able to put on muscles as well. You might gain weight easy. You won't sleep well, your cycle is going to be off, because all of those need energy. And it's not just food equals energy. Fuel has to be your food, which is fuel has to be converted into energy, and that's what your cells do. And it's the ATP, the adenosine triphosphate that those cells produce, that's what we use to run our systems. And if we don't convert well, or our system is sluggish, or if things are inhibiting that process, then it doesn't matter what we eat, it it won't function properly, and so that's why so many people are just focusing on this food part of it, without understanding the full concept of well, why don't I still feel good if I'm eating just meat or just carbs or whatever it is they're doing, because it's not just that single thing. There's a multiple things that are going to help you produce energy well.
Stephanie Mara 08:21
Yeah, what have you found in your work affects how our body produces that energy and that it's not just about eating the right things at the right time.
Kate Deering 08:34
When you look at like those factors, like I said, there is a fuel source. So usually, our primary fuel sources are either carbohydrates or fat. Those are our fuel sources. We also can use protein, but primarily we want to use your protein as structure or help produce hormones or enzymes. It's kind of a different but we certainly can use it as a fuel source, and then we use all the vitamins and minerals that are going to help that fuel source to convert into energy. So if we are lacking in any sort of nutrients that's going to inhibit our energy process. So for instance, if we look at a lot of different issues, maybe anemia or low thyroid or chronic fatigue or any of these things, they all have some similar symptoms, right? A lot of times you will have a multitude of things. Are like, there could be a lot of reasons why you're having fatigue, multiple. And the reason is, is because they're all an energy issue, that something is inhibiting the body for producing energy. It could be you're low B12, maybe you're low iron. If you're anemic, you're going to have an energy issue. Maybe you have low folate, you're going to have an energy issue. Maybe you don't breathe properly, you don't have low oxygen, you're going to have an energy issue. If you don't have enough fuel or food still coming in, there's going to be an energy issue. If you are actually hypothyroid and you don't produce enough thyroid, which is a conductor, he's the guy in the cell telling everyone to speed up. If he's not in there, or you don't have enough of him, then that is going to inhibit energy production as well. So those are all the factors that we need to produce energy appropriately. And then there's other things that can inhibit that entire process, and those things are stress, a high cortisol state that's going to inhibit that healthy energy production. We have GI toxins. We have endotoxins. These are bacterial toxins that can leak into your blood system, and that can inhibit our ability, our cell's ability to produce energy excess estrogen. So women certainly have a disadvantage here, and because they have more estrogen or more estrogen exposure in their lifetime, they are more prone to a lot of different issues, one of those being autoimmune or even hypothyroid. So that is also a possibility of inhibiting energy production excessive amounts of iron in the diet as an oxidant, the polyunsaturated fats, or as other people refer to as the seed oils, although there's more than those, but those polyunsaturated fats can also inhibit energy production. So there are a multitude. So it gets a little complex. When I look at people, I'm like, okay, well, where are you depending on your symptoms? Could this be creating a problem? So if someone has a lot of GI distress, a lot of dysbiosis going on, could that create an energy issue? Yeah, multiple ways. Maybe they're not even absorbing their food or breaking down their food, but also the colon bacteria could be producing toxins that those are leaking into the blood system and inhibiting the energy from being produced. So when you look at things that way, because again, in that kind of scenario, in that kind of individual, sometimes you can give them the best of diets, but if they can't handle it because they have a GI issue, then it's going to be irrelevant. And I think that's why some people get stuck, because they just get on a diet without really taking their specific situation and consideration, and then they try to just use it. And sometimes it works. I'm not saying it doesn't, but then it might have a problem later on down the road.
Stephanie Mara 11:49
Yeah, I love what you're pointing out is how bio individual this needs to be based off of your body and what your body is working through, and that you need to work sometimes with individuals like yourself to be like, let's actually assess the current function of your body and what needs more support. And that doesn't always come from food like you're pointing to. Sometimes it comes from looking at, are your systems working optimally, and also, what are your stress levels like, and how is your body processing that cortisol so that it is more nuanced than we make it out to be. And you know, you put out a really great post a bit ago on just like, how we can't even kind of make weight and its loss an identifier of if how you're eating is working for you or not. And I'd love for you to maybe talk about that a little bit more, because there's so much focus on like weight loss, and that being the identifier that how you're eating means it's leaning towards health, which isn't necessarily true.
Kate Deering 12:53
Yes, and although we, most of us, like to use weight as a metric, because most people go into some sort of dietary approach, and usually you know, what do you want to do? What do you want to achieve? And it's like, well, I want to lose weight, so we first have to establish A. is your body healthy enough to lose weight right now? And if there's a surmountable amount of stress on your system, you're not sleeping, that your cycles are regular, you feel like garbage, right? And then I try to put you into even a more deficit, right? Because for you to actually lose weight, you still have to eat less than your body's capable of burning is only going to make you feel worse. And I could do it, and we could lose weight, and you are just going to feel worse and worse and worse and worse. And so that's not a good metric. I can just tell someone to not eat, they'll lose weight and they're going to feel like garbage. So that's not how we should determine if you're healthy. It can certainly be a sign as you get healthy and you start to lose weight and you lose body fat, and that helps. Yes, we can use it still as a marker. It shouldn't just be the marker. And so for me, I always try to look at your body. Needs to be able to sleep, and we need to be able to feel good through the day. We need to be able to digest your food. We need to have those things working before I ever try to make you eat less, because, again, as we've talked about, we need certain things to produce enough energy, and if I give you less of those things, right? So when we eat less, we get less nutrition and we get less fuel, then the body has to then use you as its fuel source. And anytime we do that to someone, what most people don't understand is, anytime I do put you into a deficit and try to force you to lose more body fat, that is a an additional stress on your system. I have to stress your system to do that. And if your body is already overly stressed, you're going to have the hardest time managing that, and it's just going to like I said, you will end up feeling worse and so, and that's where most people get to, right? And you see it in men and women, you know, it's almost like they've done this yo yo dieting, or they've dieted or done whatever for decades of their life, and then they hit their 30s to 40s. Happen to me, and all of a sudden your body says, nope, not gonna do it anymore. And it's going to resist you on every way possible. And it's very frustrating, because you're like, I'm working even harder and training harder, and I feel worse. And that's what happened to me, and I see it all the time, specifically with women, because women want to be this ideal tiny little weight. They want to also have a family and work and run everything and be pulled in 85 different directions and still diet. And it just doesn't work. And so we have to learn to kind of reprogram ourselves so we start to think of health in a different way. And you have to nourish and take care of yourself, give yourself enough fuel and nutrition so you can kind of get through those times. So when the body is having a stressful experience, we have to function on, look, we need to get you enough resources to manage that, and then once your life gets in better control, and you're sleeping better and you feel better, then we can put the stress of dieting onto your life, and then you'll be able to handle it a lot better, without all these negative effects.
Stephanie Mara 13:39
Yeah, I'm curious when you got to that point, because you said there were a lot of things that you started to explore what made a difference for you in starting to maybe get more of that fuel and feel like your body was producing energy more efficiently.
Kate Deering 16:09
Well, for me, you know, I've been heavily in the fitness industry a lot of my life, and always involved in nutrition, but it was always about being super lean, and so for me, I had to start using different markers. And the first marker I started to do was take my body temperature. And I was like, wow, you know, so we should be 98.6 through the day. That is actually normal body temperature. I was like, 96 so I was two and a half degrees cooler than what I should and I did, I would be cold. And what that tells me is my body's conserving energy, and I'm not producing adequate amount of heat. Now, I could go and exercise a crapload and still burn a decent amount of calories, but it's when at rest, my basal metabolic rate, the metabolism at rest, was quite low, and so my focus now became on getting that up. Basically what I had to do was I decreased my training immensely, and then when I did that and I wasn't driving myself on stress hormones, I realized how tired I was, and so I ended up actually taking lots of naps and trying to allow myself to rest without stressing the crap out of myself all the time. In addition, I tried to just eat more. And yes, I gained weight initially, because I think my body was like, finally, you're feeding us and letting us rest. We've been going, going, going, going. And so there is a definite mind shift. Nobody likes that. For me, it felt like a necessary evil at the time. And for some that they kind of have to go through that little bit of process. Not everybody does. But I just started focusing more on, how am I sleeping? How am I recovering? I used to be, I used to train just in pain a lot of time, you know, I'm just like, you know, it was just this mindset that that's just how I thought. I used to how you had to do things. And I used to think I had to train, like, two hours a day. I train maybe 45 minutes three times a week now. It's completely different. I can eat more now than I could 12 years ago. So it's a complete reframing of how you see things. But like I said, I had to change how I looked at things, because if you focus on the weight, you're going to get yourself in trouble. You got to focus on other things, sleep, digestion, my cycle, energy through the day, recovery and then finally, feeling I could eat enough and not worry all the time, right? The noise that I had around food was insane, and when I actually started specifically eating a lot more carbohydrate, the noise died, which I never thought would ever happen, but it did. When you don't have that noise going on, god, you have a lot more freeing energy available to you. So eventually body temperature, you'll get warmer. Your body will produce more heat. Your body will actually get used to eating more calories, and then you're like, wow, there is another way out of this, and I didn't have to drag myself down a hole to get there.
Stephanie Mara 18:45
I love how what you're offering is so simple of like, you needed to rest more you needed to take more naps, you needed to eat more carbohydrates. And again, I find that what we're talking about is there's so much noise that makes it feel like so complicated. Like, how can I put all of this together? But I do find that for a lot of individuals as well, they are exhausted, and it does need to start with, like, how do we shift the body more into that safety and relaxation response, where it can function more optimally. I'm curious if you can speak more to the carbohydrate piece. Because, my gosh, has carbohydrates been demonized. And I know I've been on my own journey with my relationship with carbs, where had a similar experience of for much of the time, like, kind of being like, okay, you know this, this keto thing's kind of getting popular and like, should I be eating less carbs? And then every time I tried, it felt absolutely horrible. And I think in playing with eating less carbs and then adding them back in and eating an adequate amount of carbs that my body needed, I know from a somatic perspective, I felt different in my body, I could feel how much carbohydrates do for me and how much less joy, presence, energy, mental clarity I experienced without eating enough carbs. So I'm wondering if you can speak more to that piece.
Kate Deering 20:18
Yeah, so carbs and how we'll say, you know, there's a lot of foods that are under the carbohydrate umbrella. You know, that would be your fruits and vegetables, and then there's obviously starches, potatoes, rice, and there can be grains. And then there's like, things like sugar and honey. I'm not really putting under there, like cookies and cake, which are usually, quite honestly, there are some level of sugar and carbs in there, but they're also very fatty foods, but that's the primarily where we're going to look under it would be grains and starches like roots and rice, and then fruits and vegetables, honey, sugar. Carbohydrates are, for the most part, your cells primary fuel source. It digests fairly quickly, gets into your blood, go through your liver, and your cells can use it fairly quickly, quicker than it can use fat as fuel. So when you are under times of stress or working out, or you're busy through the day, your body will want a lot of carbohydrates or sugars or glucose. There are certain cells within your body that can only use carbohydrates or glucose. That would be your red blood cells, the retinas of your eyes and pretty much your nervous system, right? Unless you're in a ketogenic or starvation, where they will use ketones, but even then, it still needs some level of glucose. So they're very, very essential. Can you survive on a zero carb diet? You absolutely can, right? We don't have to consume them in our diet, because they're so important that our body has a mechanism to make its own right. We can go through a process called gluconeogenesis, where we break down our carbohydrate, other substances, and make glucose from them, and we do that so we don't die, right? Because if we did not do that, we couldn't have our blood cells, our nervous system would crash down. That would be the end of it. So that's how essential are. So when people say they're not essential, I'm like, yes, they're so essential, because your body has a mechanism, if you eat none to make their own. That's how essential they are, right? So we don't need, certainly, do we need protein from outsourcing? Yes, we can't make our own protein, so we have to have that from a dietary source. But carbohydrates, this, we can make our own. But when it comes to light throughout the day, and specifically under duress or stress, your body will always look for your quick fuel source, which are going to be carbohydrates or glucose. And that's why you have blood sugar, and that's why it's highly monitored, because you need a certain amount of sugar or glucose in your blood, and if it goes too low, you will die, right? And so all of these things are highly regulated. So even on a zero carb diet, you have to maintain blood glucose numbers. So of course, you'll do that by making your own but again, all of that entire process to make your own glucose is regulated by your stress hormones. Right? Your stress hormones are designed to elevate your blood sugar, cortisol, adrenaline, glucagon, they are all there to elevate blood sugar so it doesn't go too low, and so if you continually live in that spot, right, you eat no carbs forever, then we're in this low level of stress already. We're stressing our system slightly so that we can maintain blood sugar now it that's a good thing if you don't have food, or you're out in the woods and you know, absolutely essential, right? Cortisol is not bad. Adrenaline's not bad. None of those things are bad. We just don't want to continually stay in that state. And the way we stay out of that state is we provide ourselves with enough carbohydrates, because those are the only things that are going to mitigate that stress response. Because as soon as your body actually gets carbs, glucose into the blood, then it will go, oh, we don't need to make any more. So we'll dampen the stress response right now, if that was the only thing those hormones were doing was just elevating your blood sugar, then fine. But they're not. They're doing other things. They're breaking down other tissue. You just don't want to be in that state on a continuing basis. But what we're finding is people, as they age, and it's not inherently age, I like to say it's just more years on this planet for you to stress your body, they continually move into that space, meaning they're living in a stress response all the time. And how we know that is because as soon as you get in the hyper stress state, you actually produce a low thyroid state. Now you're not running on proper thyroid function any longer. You're running on stress hormones, and stress hormones dampen your thyroid function. The symptoms will be you feel wired and tired, you feel anxious or depressed, you feel like you can't sleep, or you have really light sleep through the night, right? You can't hold on to muscle or make muscle, you gain weight. Some people lose if they're in a hyper stress state, they have adrenaline going through there that kills their appetite. So they might make people to actually lose weight. They can further on down the road, you might see them become insulin resistant, diabetic, all the stress disorders are kind of happening along the way there right which can lead to cancer, dementia, arthritis. They're eventually down the road if you continually stay in that spot. So again, we always want to bring them back to look, we look at your symptoms and go. We need to try to reduce those we want to get you to sleep better. We want to have you feel more steady energy. We want to try to get you off of your if you're on an antidepressant, because you feel so poorly, right what is going on with your system that we can support it better so that you don't feel this way. Because I have a deep belief that your body, with the right resources, can do what it needs to do to function properly, but that all requires energy. It's the fundamental thing that keeps us all alive, period. And if you don't produce it well, or you don't have the resources, then you are going to experience symptoms, illness, disease, eventually. And so we have to go back to that always. And so I can't even remember what our initial question was, but hopefully that answered it.
Stephanie Mara 26:00
Yeah, yeah, no, that was all so great. And you know, something that I hear in that is that a lot of the times from like wellness culture and diet culture, carbohydrates have been so demonized as a thing that is going to make you sick. And I love that what you are bringing in is that actually, if you are not eating enough carbohydrates, and you're keeping your body in this low level state of stress all the time, and you're in that for years and decades that that actually is going to lead to the bodily symptoms and experience that you're trying to avoid based off of cultures that are maybe sending messages that don't really understand what you're talking about and like how the body functions and what it needs to function well.
Kate Deering 26:46
Absolutely. And this isn't to say so again, this is where nuance and context get involved. It's not to say go out and eat if you're been on a low carb diet, now just go out and eat all the carbs you want and you will be fixed. It doesn't work that way. And so we always have to start with the body that we have in front of us. And some people absolutely have poor glucose tolerance, or sugar tolerance, and they eat carbs and they get blood sugar spikes, or they just don't feel good. So that individual needs to be handled differently, right? First, we need to understand why they're experiencing that. What certain function could be inhibiting their body's ability to utilize glucose, and there can be many, and then we need to try to address that, and then we probably need to move very slowly with them when adding carbohydrates back in, because, yeah, that's a real thing, and just adding carbs isn't going to fix that situation. And I think that's where people have issues, and specifically because we just went through a phase of everybody and they still maybe are wearing like, continuous glucose monitors or CGMS, and they're all monitoring their blood sugar, and they're like, oh my gosh, my blood sugar went up. I shouldn't eat that anymore. And that alone is inherently very stressful. And I think those can be used as a data point. But if you're living in that space and trying to never get a glucose spike, you're going to, that is not the way to live, right? Carbohydrates are going to increase your blood glucose. You want to stay super high? Of course not. But, it's giving us information of how your response is to glucose. Does that mean you should remove the glucose or the sugar? No, it means that maybe your cells aren't functioning optimally, and we need to fix that so that you can handle the sugars better, right? Avoiding them is only going to make the situation worse long term. Now, of course, some people go, well, I want a low carb diet, and I feel so much better. I lost weight. And not going to disagree with you, right? If you are in a bad state and you have poor glucose tolerance, and then all of a sudden you get rid of that, and it helps you help to lose weight, and now you're not dealing with the blood sugar cycle all the time, that will feel better, for sure. And a lot of times that individual, you know, I don't know what their diet could have been, but maybe they were just eating a lot of crap and sugary foods and sugary fat foods, and then they removed all of those. So that would be an improvement. So we always need context. We always need to define what carbs we're actually meaning here, right? I'm never meaning, right, I'm not saying go out and eat a ton of cookies or cake because there's sugar in them. Those foods aren't going to work. And it's always saying, Where are you now? Where is your tolerance? And what can we add into you right now that where you can tolerate and slowly improve it while we're monitoring things like your temperature, and your pulse, your sleep, or whatever, you know, and sleep is a good one, specifically for women, because a lot of them been on low carb diet that once you actually implement carbs very slowly, it's a thing that greatly improves. With most women, they're always like, oh my god, I'm sleeping so much better. Maybe I put on five pounds I could care less, because I don't I feel like a normal human again.
Stephanie Mara 29:39
Yeah. Thank you so much for also bringing in the other factors. It was actually a question I was going to ask you, and then you already answered it. The other factors that we can track, besides weight and that, that is kind of the last identifier that we get to pick up on, because if you are not functioning well, it doesn't kind of matter where your weight is at, if you were like you're pointing to not sleeping, well, don't feel like you can get through the day. Feel like a zombie as you're going through the day and that, yeah, sometimes I find, and I'm curious how you've worked with individuals that there's so much fear and trepidation around going towards maybe doing things and eating certain foods, like more complex carbohydrates, that are going to support the body in stabilizing and actually feel safer to be here and start functioning better. But there's also a lot of fear in doing that, because of the culture and the world that we live in, like you were pointing to, of everyone always feeling like they need to be at their smallest, tiniest body. And I'm wondering how you've navigated that with people.
Kate Deering 30:47
Very good question. It is a total reframing. I have to get people to focus on something different. I'm like, don't look over there. Don't look over that weight loss side over. I mean, they kind of will pay attention like, look, these are the markers we're going to pay attention to now, right? So if they come and they're like, I'm having a lot of constipation, bloating right, there's some GI distress going on, and I'm cold and I don't sleep great, we'll use those as your markers if we are on the right track and we're moving, because if we are, those things should start to improve. And we'll take your body temperature and your pulse to make sure that those markers are improving, and so that's what we focus on. And I'm not saying, don't ever look over here, because I don't want people just to eat an enormous amount of food and let their weight go crazy. I don't want to do that either. Putting on tons of excess body fat just to put on body fat is not inherently a great idea. Some people do need to put on some weight, but for the most part, most people don't, and so we want to pay attention to it. And also, if we start adding a lot of carbs, or not a lot, but some, and then we just notice that they start putting on weight really rapidly, that is definitely a sign to me that they aren't tolerating them very well. And so we have to then look right? Well, I definitely know that GI distress, and if they have a lot of bacterial toxins, and maybe they have some gut permeability that alone could create some problems. So maybe we just work on that right now. We address that situation and try to improve that, because I know if we do, then they'll be able to tolerate carbs better. And so there's a lot of working in layers. And to me, I just try to direct the ship, like over here, keep over here, look over here, and then, you know, so I'm like, okay, these are things, is this better? Yes, okay, but, Kate, I didn't lose any weight. Okay. But is this better? Is this better? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, so let's work within those. And I just said, look, once you get to a place where your body feels better, then we just let it stay there for a little bit, right? We don't want to go right into this calorie deficit. We want to give your body some time to acclimate. And quite honestly, usually, when you get somebody in that position, they do feel a lot better. Normally, they're like, I don't care as much. Feel a lot better. And because, you know, we feel more normalized. You know, when you actually give someone enough energy and nutrition so their brains functioning, they feel actually more secure. They feel more grounded. They don't feel so overwhelmed. They're okay. They almost have a different perspective and way of looking things. And then I'm like, look, we'll stay here for a little bit, and then maybe we just work on now increasing your workout time. Maybe we train a little bit harder. Maybe we focus on a little bit of body composition right now and not look at the scale and normally over time, and then I'm like, okay, now we're in a healthy place. If we want, we can put you in a deficit and work on some fat loss, and we'll do that for a period of time, making sure that our markers, sleep, digestion, energy, are still good, because when they're healthy, they'll be able to manage a diet and not feel bad, and they can get through it and not feel hungry. They feel like, you know, it's still again, you have to monitor your intake, but for the most part, they feel fine, right? And then it's just a matter of how long you're going to stay in it. Do you need a break? We look at your schedule. We go look, are you going on vacation and you're going to Italy? Yeah, you probably don't want to be doing that then. So let's take you out. Let's make give you more room so you can live your life and go and have a good time, enjoy your life, and then come back and we'll reassess that's a much more sustainable approach than white knuckling at it all the time and dealing and saying willpower, because I did that and it's miserable. The food noise, the constantly thinking about, what do I eat? I can only eat meat. Okay, where am I going to go to eat if I only eat meat? How am I going to go to that party if I'm only eating meat or, you know, I'm trying to do eat clean. How do I go out with my friends? It overtakes your life. What I want people to do is like, look, I want to teach you how your body works, and I want you to understand it so that you can make the choices for you for whatever goal. Now, in the beginning, yeah, there's some shifts that you're going to have to do, but ultimately, we want to get you to a place where you can handle a multitude of foods, you can go out and enjoy yourself. You keep everything in balance and knowing what is how it's going to affect you, and then you make choices accordingly. And when you get people in a healthier place, they usually make better choices, because we. got to get them over that kind of hump, and it doesn't become as stressful. And then all that noise comes down, and then the stress also comes down, which is also just healthier for them.
Stephanie Mara 35:09
Yeah, I really appreciate you bringing in the aspect of sustainability. And so often, you know, especially when someone is immersed in dieting and getting off the diet, and then going back on a diet and getting off the diet, like it's not sustainable, and that oftentimes there's not a lot of exploration. Like I remember one of my first diets when I was 13 years old. No one explained to me at the time what I was doing to my body and how to support my body. It was never about health. It was not about how to stabilize my body. I love that you're explaining all of this of just like, based on what the body needs to function well, and that when you're going on a diet, there's kind of this, you jump into it and it's like, well, there's this idea of, I just need to eat as little as possible, while still feeling like I can kind of somewhat get through the day like you said, like you're white knuckling it and thinking about food all the time without being like, okay, there is a way of eating that I can go after what I want for my body, and it may not be what I've taught I'm supposed to look like, but also what you're bringing in is like just the enjoyment of living your life. And how can we eat in a way and support the body that you can have enough energy to go out with your friends and enjoy your life and feel like you can be present and sleep well. And so, you know, there's just a lot more layers to this. And you pointed to protein. So I know we've been kind of on the carbohydrate track. I am curious about your thoughts, because protein has just exploded in popularity of you have to eat 30 grams of protein at every meal, and you know, like you have to get in more and more protein, especially as you're going through perimenopause and menopause, and I'm just curious about all of the protein popularity and your thoughts on that.
Kate Deering 37:07
I definitely believe protein is very important, specifically with women, and specifically when we get older, and we find that most women, as they're getting into perimenopause and menopause, they're not eating enough protein. They might be eating 50, 60, grams. I definitely see that's not enough. Now, how much do they need in their current state, might be the million dollar question, because if somebody is actually very insulin resistant diabetic, sometimes, to get them out of that giving them an excessive amount of protein might initially not be the best idea. It depends, because for those individuals, you really want to start improving glucose sensitivity. And sometimes having them make 15, maybe 20% protein is a better route of their total calories. Because I've seen people eating, you know, 40% of their calories as protein. They're like. And there are some studies that are coming out and saying, you're like, if you know, giving older people, even more gram of protein per pound per se and a body weight. And so it's a lot of protein for those older individuals. And so my theories are for women, you know, could be anywhere from 80 to 120, grams, depending on their their size and their goals. You definitely need it. You need it for so many things. And we can think about it has its protein is our structure. It's made of our skin, our muscles, bone, and then our hormones, our enzymes. It is very, very important, and we can't make our own protein, right? We have to get it from some sort of dietary source. And as you age, you know your body is again, it goes more into that stressed fear, and we metabolize it. We break these things down. That's why old people look smaller, and you get through osteoporosis, and everything looks, you know, tinier and tinier as they age. We can prevent a lot of that if we do eat enough of the building blocks, and then we create some resistance training in our life, and we try to mitigate the stress response as much as we can. That doesn't mean never having a stressful experience, right? That's not life. That would just mean you're sitting in your house and not moving. We want to be able to have those experiences. We just want to be able to be resilient to them and have them and then get out of them, and then be able to recover and so forth. That's really the important part. But how I see is protein you should have a variety of sources, from muscle meats to seafood to organs to dairy, some level of bone broth or gelatinous material is also good, eggs. You know, you should have a variety of different sources. I usually prefer animal proteins over vegetable proteins or vegetarian type proteins if they're very well prepared and that person can handle them, meaning, you know, if they're eating some beans and they're prepared properly and the GI doesn't get distressed, then fine, I'm okay with that as well. But for most people, you know I see, I would say 95% of the people I see have GI distress. I usually would tell them, Don't eat the vegetarian proteins, because they're really hard on your digestive system. And so we might eat the other ones, the animal based proteins and protein sources and the nutrients seem to be more bioavailable in the animal sources than the vegetarian ones, because the vegetable ones are always wrapped up some sort of fibrous material, and if they're already having GI distress, they might not be able to break that down properly. You usually need, like, twice as much protein in a vegetable source as you do animal source, that's a considerable amount of food, and that's why you usually see that some people are just under eating that amount of protein. So very important animal or vegetable, you kind of need to see what your goals are to how much you're going to have. You don't need to be eating 200 grams of protein. That's usually pretty excessive. But for most women, you know, anywhere from 180 to 120 grams should be adequate.
Stephanie Mara 40:42
Yeah. I mean, something that I noticed as I've aged, you know, I'm in my last year of my 30s right now, so I'll be 40 next year, is I know that the idea of eating more and more protein has gotten so popularized. And what I've noticed is I was like, okay, let's play. I'm always a proponent of playing with the way that we eat so that we can find how it feels in our body and find a way of eating that works for us. And I was like, okay, so there's this suggestion floating around that we need to be eating more protein, especially as women, as we age. Let me notice how that feels. And I did notice a big difference, you know, even increasing my protein intake, just a little bit that it was like, okay, I'm starting to notice more energy. I'm starting to notice more mental clarity. I'm actually noticing slightly less food cravings. And I find that it's like, there's so much, again, conflicting advice out there that if we just bring it back to what is your felt sense and get out of like, I love that you were saying earlier, like, let's just focus over here. Like, okay, yep, yep, you see the weight loss over there. And let's just focus over here of like, I feel it's the same thing in what I explore of like, let's keep focusing on how you feel. Like, do you feel good eating this amount of protein. You know, sometimes if I eat what would be described as, like, quote, unquote, too much protein, I feel that I don't feel good eating too much protein for my body. And my body's like, I'm done now, please don't give me any more protein. And so I think that there are ways to kind of hear more of our body's feedback around, like you're saying, in the range of the amount of protein that we need, of what's going to resonate most for us based off of the feedback that we're getting from our body.
Kate Deering 42:30
Yeah. I mean, how people feel is pretty important. You definitely want people to get back into their bodies. I feel like so many people aren't in their bodies. They don't even like they're not even in there to have an awareness of what feels good like. What do you mean? What is it supposed to feel like? Tell me. What should I feel? The other thing that protein does in a meal is it offers some level of blood sugar stability. When you have things like protein or fat or fiber in a meal, they will slow down the glucose response of that meal, and so it makes you feel more satiated. So if someone isn't having enough of those things in their meal. Then if they're just having 100% carbohydrates in a meal, usually they'll feel hungry in an hour and a half, your body's getting all that in quick. Your insulin is elevating, it's going into storage, or you're using as energy. And now your body's like, hey, we're done. We need more. Versus if you have protein in a meal, that meal usually feels like it lasts a lot longer for you and so and you feel more stable with that. And so that's the other component it offers to anybody in their meal. And that's why, for a lot of women, specifically, they're eating like 10, 15 grams in a meal. And when you up that to 20, 25, or 30, they're like, I didn't change anything. But now this meal lasts four or five hours before it was only lasting two hours, and all we did was increase the protein intake. And so it's a way for and then they can feel like I don't need to eat, you know, because I was eating every two or three hours and I over consumed it, versus now I don't feel like I need to do that. So that is an important factor that protein offers in a meal. The one thing I would say about feeling or when people eat intuitively, I think it's a good goal to get to, I think a lot of people don't know how to read the signals in their body initially. So because they're like, I feel like I need something I, you know, well, do I or don't I? Or a lot of times it's like, look, just do this. Pay attention to how long it lasts for you, and then we'll monitor it. Because, you know, there's not a lot of trust they have in their body any longer, so they're not totally sure, because a lot of times, a lot of people like, I wake up and I don't feel like I want to eat, so I don't eat till noon, right? And I'm like, well, that feeling isn't good, though. We want you to actually wake up and feel hungry, so initially, then we might have to just eat something to start triggering that body's response. Because that tells me, look, you should be hungry in the morning. If you're not, then we're waking up in a slight stress response. Your body's already trying to make its own fuel, and that's why you're not getting that hunger cue. And that just tells me you're living half that day already in some slight stress response. We don't want that. We want to try to get you out of it as quickly as possible, which means we need to break the fast. We need to eat something breakfast. And then as people start to incorporate that, they will start to get the hunger cue as they continue.
Stephanie Mara 45:09
Yeah, I completely agree with you. I find that when we're living in the stress response that you've been talking about, it's really hard to hear our hunger and fullness cues when a lot of the times, our hunger is shut down when we are living in that stress response. And so to say, oh, I just need to trust my body initially, actually, your body needs a little bit more structure. Like, I think of it as, like, you know, a mother who's gonna hug their children and be like, I've got you and I'm gonna keep you safe. And it's just like, we kind of need to do that for our body of just like, hey, I'm gonna put you on a consistent cadence. I'm gonna feed you regularly throughout the day to stabilize your blood sugar levels. I'm gonna support you in feeling cared for. So I completely agree with you in that. I am curious to hear your thoughts on just as you were saying, like waking up and eating, and if we're not feeling hungry, like a lot of people, be like, oh, well, great. I guess I'll just, you know, intermittent fast today, and that's supposed to be healthy for me. So I'm curious about your thoughts on intermittent fasting, because I know a lot of those that I work with are kind of in the, you know, struggling with binge eating, and kind of the spectrum of disordered eating and eating disorders. And usually, I kind of say, from a nervous system perspective that sometimes we need to, like, let go of intermittent fasting because it's stressing your body out even more and put yourself on this consistent eating rhythm. I'm curious about your thoughts on it.
Kate Deering 46:33
Yes, well, I would agree with that statement completely. I think intermittent fasting can be used successfully as a tool for an individual that's already healthy and their body can sustain that amount of non eating and as long as in that fasting period, they're not trying to do an immensely stressful thing, or they're not under an incredible amount of stress at the time, then they probably could successfully do intermittent fasting and get the result, which I would assume would be weight loss or whatever. You know, some people do it for religious reasons. Fine. I'm not a fan for most individuals, because I don't think most people are in a state where they can handle and do it effectively without stressing their body even more, because you're not eating for 16 or however many hours you're not eating, and your body has to find fuel source somewhere, right? It would, it would be wonderful if all it did was chew the fat off of you, and that's all it did. But it doesn't again, it needs you have to maintain blood sugar, so you'll go through if you don't have enough stored glucose in the liver, then your body's going to have to go through gluconeogenesis, so it might break down muscle tissue or other kind of sources to produce glucose in a system that's already stressed, that isn't going to again, we're taking another step into into function that we don't want to get into. It's already a problem, right? So sure, could you possibly lose weight? People do, and they usually just eat less because there's a smaller window, but so they eat less and they lose weight. Can you just eat less and lose weight without intermittent fasting? Yes, there's no difference, right? And we've done studies on that. It's usually the way that intermittent fastness works for weight loss. Is just the matter that you're just eating less in that shorter window, you can eat those same amount of calories throughout the day. It'll probably be a little bit healthier for you, specifically, if you are already not feeling great or stressed or whatever, because it would mitigate you going into that stress response. So to me, there's always good and bad to everything. I always tell it to people. I don't like labeling it yes or no. It's like, is your body capable withstanding this stress on the system? Stressors aren't bad, they can be good. Exercise is a stress if your body's strong enough and you properly fueled, that exercise will add additional muscle resilience, strength. Those are all good things. However, if your body isn't you're not well fueled, you're stressed out, you didn't eat, and you go train hard, that's just going to crush you more. It's going to tear down your muscle. You're not going to repair, you won't sleep good. It's going to zap your nervous system. And so we have to always understand our state when we put these stressors upon us, they're not inherently bad, but if our body can't handle it, yeah, it's going to be bad. If our body can, then it could have some level of resilience to us. Or maybe we just don't even need to do it. Maybe it's fine, right? We don't need to constantly stress the crap out of our self just to build resilience, we can do other things like nourish and support and give ourselves better nutrition and produce more energy, and that will just create a better foundation.
Stephanie Mara 49:28
Yeah, I really just appreciate the layers that you go into and that nothing is necessarily good or bad. You know that there is research out there on every single kind of modality out there. And if you're looking for something, you're probably gonna find what you're looking for to back whatever it is that you want to prove or disprove. I love that you're bringing in of like, we have to look at your body and what your body is working with. And I'm curious, you know, for individuals who are listening to this and they're like, okay, where do I start with all this? You know, I always like to offer kind of like a baby step, of like, where someone can start to incorporate some of the wisdom that you've shared today. Is there any baby step that you would offer to listeners?
Kate Deering 50:10
I would actually say, go read my book that will help you. It's a good entry to this. But even if they read my book, I would say, look, you need to know exactly where you are right now. Before you go anywhere, we do that with you give directions to someone you're like, where, where you located. So a good place to start is to food log to actually see what you are doing. Put your food on an app like Chronometer or My Fitness Pal, and they will kind of look and see how much food are you actually consuming. When are you eating your food? How much protein are you actually getting? How much carbs are you getting, how much fat are you getting, right? And then go from there. So now you have, okay, and then you go, I'm eating whatever, 2000 calories, and I'm gaining weight. Okay, well, then we would know, well, you're, you're in a slight calorie surplus, so you might have to pull your calories back, but then you have to kind of look, what am I trying to achieve? What are my goals here? If your body temperature is very, very cold, and there's a lot of other issues going on there, then, and you're eating, like, 100 grams of carbohydrates, then I'm like, okay, we probably need to pull that up. But it's very important for people to go look, when you start adding more carbs, you will technically, if you don't change anything else, you'll be adding more calories that will put you in a calorie surplus, so you will gain weight. And it's not inherently because the carbs made you gain weight. It's just the increase in calories made you gain weight. So when you increase carbs, a lot of times, you need to decrease something else, and usually it's the fat. And so you usually slowly but surely start shifting those macronutrients. If you do it too quickly, your body won't like it. Fat is a great stabilizer, so adding a ton of carbs and reducing fat, people feel a little bit wonky initially, so you need to move it slow and steady and just monitor things like your temperature and your pulse and your sleep or whatever other symptoms that you may have. If you do have a lot of GI distress, then you're going to have to take a little bit of a different route, because that's a factor we have to consider and so and a lot of people don't tolerate, or if you're insulin resistant or pre diabetic, we have to now consider that differently and maybe have a different route for you. But it all can still work. We just have a different path, but always, finding your starting point is always going to be the best, best place to start, because, if not, you're just guessing. Well, I think I eat this right? I think, well, we don't know. We gotta look.
Stephanie Mara 52:31
I love these suggestions. And for those who are listening, I know that sometimes, some people feel like they've, trackers have been triggering, and so I feel like it's utilize it in a way that one check also where you're at in your sometimes food recovery journey. And I know for some people I've worked with, they're like, well, I actually, I don't want to track everything, but I would love to know, you know, how much protein am I eating? I don't actually know if I'm eating enough protein. And I think that there are certain other apps. I don't know the names of them in this right now, it will just track, like, if you put in just the protein amount that you approximately ate that day, it will kind of be like, hey, you're in this range, you know. So I think that there are ways to work with this in a way that works for you, that might not feel triggering, and like you said, that there are other ways that, if tracking macros feels like too much right now, that you can also take your temperature, you know, look at your heart rate, check am I sleeping well? And so that there are other identifiers that you can continue to check in on and measure that isn't in a way that maybe feels as triggering as kind of writing down everything, but yeah, sometimes it can be supportive, even in a non caloric way, like, even if you don't use an app and just kind of look at, okay, if I wrote my meals down on a piece of paper and I wrote the cadence of when I was eating, like, I know when I worked at an outpatient eating disorder clinic, to stay away from the whole like, calories in, calories out conversation, we would have a clock, and someone would just write, okay, what's the time that I ate my meals? And then you even get to see like, oh, am I eating my meals too close together? Oh, why wasn't I able to last like, three or four hours off of that meal that I ate earlier? Like, there's many ways to kind of notice is this way of eating working for me.
Kate Deering 54:25
Yes, there definitely are, and I agree. I mean food logging to some individuals specifically, maybe that someone has an eating disorder can be very triggering. I think it's a great tool, but it certainly can be triggering to a lot of people. And so there are still ways that you can assess. It is a very big feedback, though, right? But if you know in your head, like, okay, you can be like I just ate breakfast and I had two eggs and that was it, and I felt like crap. Okay, we know that eggs are just fat and protein. So you know, my always question, just add some carbohydrate into each of your meal. Add an apple. So add six ounces of orange juice, add something in there that it will combine with your protein and your fat, right? And so sometimes, like, look, you understand what your proteins are, understand what your carbs are. Have one in each meal. See what that feels like. There is always stepping stones, certainly, and usually it's because that person who's so triggered in some level of a stress response for a very long time, because once you start pulling that down and start feeling more grounded and more okay, then you could start to introduce something like track. But yes, usually that individual I find like, look, we just probably need to eat a little bit more in your day, and just eat a little bit more at breakfast, lunch and dinner. And these are the things you can add this, this or this, okay, that's all you're going to do. So to me, it's always measuring what they're capable of. Here's your four things you're going to do right now. That's the only thing I want you to do. Just be consistent at it. Then we'll recheck.
Stephanie Mara 55:57
Yeah, thank you so much for breaking that down, because it's like, Yeah, where's your capability, where's your capacity, right now? And let's go from there.
Kate Deering 56:06
Yes, it's always finding where you can meet that person, where you're at and it's like, what are you capable of right now? Can you do these things? Okay, you can do this, this and this, okay. This is all I want you to think about, because it can be really overwhelming sometimes to get in this space, especially people that want to actually know everything. They're like, there's so much going on. Do I do this and what is this? I go, okay, stop right. Here's what we're going to do, this, this and this. Through everything else you've been doing the same. Just focus on these three. So what will end up happening is you'll start to feel 10% better. Now we have a little bit more space. Now we have more capacity to handle a little bit more, but if I try to dump it all on you when you only have this much space, you're going to be like, I can't do it. It's too much. I'm overwhelmed, and that's more stress. So we have to always work within the parameters that our body is letting us and understand. It might take a little bit longer than we would like, but if we're open to just following the path and going, I'm just going to do these things. I can I can do these things, okay, just rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And then I'm like, Okay, I feel okay. And then here's another thing you can do, okay. And before you know it, you're a lot better, but we had to work in that space, and now you can handle a lot more.
Stephanie Mara 57:15
Yeah, I so appreciate all of your wisdom today. Thank you so much for breaking this all down. And I love just the clarity that you brought today of these tiny little things and that, like, every macronutrient is important. Feel like that's something that it sounds so simple, but I love to keep coming back to it's like we just need to keep creating balanced meals, eating consistently and like, start there, especially when it comes to the food piece, and then you can kind of tinker and tweak, like you're talking about around, okay, do we need to raise this up? Do we need to take this down? But it is kind of noticing as you maybe start to feel more stable from eating more food and eating enough of the kinds of foods that your body needs, that you will more easily hear your body's feedback from oh, I'm sleeping better, oh, I'm having easier bowel movements. Oh, I have more energy throughout the day.
Kate Deering 58:07
Yeah, you can use those metrics to establish if you're getting better. I mean, sadly, in our world, because we have so much variety now, it's become very complex. And before, when our only options were home food your mom made it. You came home and that's what you ate, and it was just like, yeah, you had some eggs and she would make you whatever. Things were a lot easier. We didn't normally overeat. We were all more there was a lot more movement in all our lives. We weren't sitting at computers all day. We have a lot more distractions in today's world, there's a lot of things have gotten in our way. The bottom line is like, if you can get back to eating real whole foods, protein and carbs in every meal, right? For women, what would they normally have to pay attention to is a lot of times they eat way too much fat, and that's why they gain fat just FYI. If you eat too much, the quickest thing that's going to turn to fat is fat. It's not going to be carbs, it's always going to be the fat. So fat is always a good one to monitor. And that's why food logging really helps. Because when they see that, I had no idea that 50% of my calories would come in for fat. And so when they adjust that, they can make some shifts. But point being is there are some basic things in the beginning to do that will help you feel better. And it is going back to the whole foods and balanced meals, carbs and proteins in each meal. So those are some basic, generalized things that, if somebody does, will really be beneficial to them.
Stephanie Mara 59:27
Yeah, well, thank you for sharing everything that you did today. I'm curious how individuals can keep in touch with you and the work that you do. And I know you mentioned that you have a book, and so I'd love to put that in the show notes. So if you want to also tell us the title of your book so individuals can know how they can find you.
Kate Deering 59:44
Yeah. So I have a book called How to heal your metabolism, and it kind of goes into the food and the details of everything we've been talking about, and it is barely from everyone tells me it's fairly easy to understand. It will kind of give you a lot of light bulb thoughts going, oh my gosh, that that, that that. So that you can get on Amazon or Barnes Noble or wherever you want to go. I have a Instagram and Facebook under Kate Deering fitness, and I put out content pretty consistently that have little blips of information, and they're kind of bite sized pieces, so it'll at least let you kind of know where I'm coming from. And a lot of things probably will resonate with you. You know you can always contact me through those social media handles.
Stephanie Mara 1:00:23
Yeah, I love your posts, so I absolutely recommend following you and love everything that you put out. And just thank you again for being here and breaking this all down today.
Kate Deering 1:00:35
My pleasure. Stephanie, thanks for having me.
Stephanie Mara 1:00:37
Yeah. Well, to everyone listening as always, if you have any questions, email me at support@stephaniemara..com, and I hope you all have a satiating and safety producing rest of the day. Bye!
Keep in touch with Kate:
Website: www.katedeering.com