In today's world, where fad diets and quick-fix solutions dominate the weight loss landscape, finding a sustainable and healthy approach can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. Esther Avant, a seasoned health coach and author of "To Your Health," offers a refreshing perspective, emphasizing balanced habits and joyful living over restrictive measures. This article delves into Avant's insights, exploring proven methods for women to achieve lasting weight loss without sacrificing their well-being.
The Intermittent Fasting Trend: A Closer Look
Intermittent fasting (IF) has gained immense popularity as a weight loss strategy, with proponents touting its simplicity and flexibility. IF involves restricting the time period when you eat, allowing you to eat as you normally would within that time window, without strict calorie counting or food restrictions. It's become a catch-all term for dietary timing, expanding the amount of time your body experiences a fasted state by reducing the eating window.
Understanding the Fed vs. Fasted State
The body exists in two primary states: fed and fasted. The fed state promotes cellular growth, while the fasted state stimulates cellular breakdown and repair. Both states can be beneficial or harmful depending on the context. For example, cellular growth builds lean muscle mass but can also contribute to cancer development.
We transition from a fed to an early fasted state several hours (five to six, on average) after our last meal, often aligning with sunset, slowed metabolism, and sleep. However, modern environments with artificial lights, 24-hour convenience stores, and food delivery services constantly prime us to eat.
The Potential Benefits of Fasting
Research, mainly in animal models but also some human trials, suggests that the body experiences numerous benefits from being in a fasted state, given its impact on cellular processes and function. In a fully fasted state, your metabolism switches its primary source of fuel from glucose to ketones, triggering cellular signaling to dampen cellular growth pathways and increase cellular repair and recycling mechanisms.
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Given how much of chronic disease is driven by underlying insulin resistance and inflammation, it's plausible that fasting may help reduce diabetes, high cholesterol, hypertension, and obesity. However, the evidence remains murky due to small sample sizes, short intervention periods, varied study designs, different fasting protocols, and participants of varying shapes and sizes.
Time-Restricted Eating and Weight Loss
The data on intermittent fasting and its impact on weight loss largely involves studies that employ the time-restricted eating methodology. To isolate the independent impact of time restriction on weight loss, it's crucial to evaluate a calorie-restricted diet combined with time-restricted eating, compared to time-restricted eating alone.
A Controlled Study on Time-Restricted Eating
One such trial involved people ages 18 to 75 with BMIs between 28 and 45, excluding those actively participating in a weight-loss program or using medications that affect weight or calorie intake. Participants were instructed to follow a 25% calorie-reduced diet (1,500 to 1,800 calories per day for men and 1,200 to 1,500 calories per day for women) with a set ratio of calories from protein, carbs, and fats. Half of the participants (those in the time-restricted eating group) consumed the prescribed calories within an eight-hour period, whereas the other half in the daily-calorie-restriction group consumed the prescribed calories without time restriction.
After a full year, 118 patients successfully completed the study, with similar rates of adherence to the diet and composition of the diet between the two groups. Both groups lost a significant amount of weight: an average of about 18 pounds for the time-restricted eating group and 14 pounds for the daily-calorie-restriction group. However, the difference in weight loss between the two groups was not statistically significant, nor was there a significant difference in weight loss among subgroups when sorted by sex, BMI at baseline, or insulin sensitivity. The resulting improvements in blood pressure, lipids, glucose, and cardiometabolic risk factors were also similar between the two groups.
The Importance of Calorie Balance
The weight loss effects of time-restricted eating derive primarily from achieving a negative energy balance. If you maintain your regular diet and then limit the time window during which you eat, it is likely that you will eat a few hundred fewer calories per day. However, if you are overcompensating for the time restriction by gorging yourself during your eating window, it will not work as a weight loss strategy and may indeed backfire.
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Potential Drawbacks of Intermittent Fasting
While weight loss for cardiometabolic health is a sensible goal, weight loss from any intervention (including intermittent fasting) often entails a concurrent loss of lean muscle mass. This has been a notable finding - what one might even call an adverse side effect - of intermittent fasting protocols.
Finally, the weight loss achieved through time-restricted eating (which we often refer to interchangeably with intermittent fasting) is likely different than the cellular adaptations that happen with more prolonged fully fasted states.
Avant's Approach to Sustainable Weight Loss
Avant emphasizes that successful weight loss isn't about perfection but about finding a sustainable balance that fits into your lifestyle. She encourages women to embrace the "messy middle," acknowledging that life happens and plans can get derailed. The key is to adapt and keep moving forward, even when faced with challenges.
Living in the Messy Middle
Don't aim for perfection. Life happens, so it's totally okay to live in the "messy middle". You might have a perfect plan and goals, but life happens. For example, your baby keeps you up all night and your workout plans get derailed. But that doesn’t mean you need to drop your efforts altogether. There is so much emphasis on what’s optimal, and what’s the best way to do everything, but we’re not robots living in a lab. People have dynamic lives with lots of things going on that we can’t really anticipate.
Many people get stuck between wanting to do things perfectly, and giving up if those goals aren’t achieved. Just because you didn’t sleep and you’re having a bad day doesn’t mean you should abandon your weight loss efforts. You don’t have to do everything, but do something. The reality is that giving the best effort that you can, every day, given the circumstances, is going to be better than nothing. Once you do this, you realize how much more livable it is. Once you develop the skills and self-trust to come up with a Plan B and you execute it, it’s always better than giving up on the whole thing.
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Establishing Your Personal Minimum
On days when everything falls apart, it's crucial to have a "personal minimum" - the bare minimum you can commit to, even when time is limited and motivation is low. This approach prevents feelings of defeat and helps maintain consistency.
Focus on the floor, you can focus on the minimum that you can expect from yourself given everything that’s going on in your life, you’ll still feel like you’ve showed up for yourself in some way. Some days, hitting 10,000 steps isn’t going to happen. But at the very least, she can commit to 5,000 steps, even if that means pacing around the house at the end of the day. and then you can gradually elevate it over time.
Confronting the Truth About Calorie Burn
Exercise represents only about 5% of daily calories burned. That pales in comparison to our non-exercise movement, which represents 15% of daily expenditure. Outside of workouts, many people are actually pretty sedentary. They aren’t taking walks for pleasure and they aren’t doing active hobbies. They are pretty much sitting or lying around the 23 other hours of the day.
Although exercise is very important, there’s a big window of improvement when it comes to general activity that you can focus on. Especially somewhere where the weather is cooperative most of the time, you can get outside and take a walk. Whether it’s breaking up your workday and taking several ten minute walks a day, or maybe starting or ending your day with a walk, start thinking about looking for ways to increase your activity. Coordinate an active hobby with friends, instead of defaulting to coffee or happy hour or dinner.
Don’t think about how to work out more, think about you can create a more active lifestyle that you actually enjoy. This could be something like pickleball, or anything that gets you moving, ideally outside, that will help contribute to your non-exercise calorie burn without stealing your life.
Prioritizing Protein and Fiber
Avant emphasizes the importance of incorporating protein and fiber into your diet. Protein aids in satiety and helps build and retain muscle mass, while fiber promotes feelings of fullness and naturally reduces the consumption of processed foods.
If you drastically under eat, you might lose weight rapidly. But it not only will it come back, but most of that weight lost on the scale is muscle, not fat. If you’re focusing on fiber, there’s a good chance you’re eating plenty of fruits, veggies, whole grains and legumes, and naturally reducing the more highly-processed, hyper palatable snack foods. Most of us don’t get nearly enough fiber, so if you’re focusing on it, you’re already taking things in the right direction. Make it as convenient as possible to eat fiber and protein. She says she has things like shrimp cocktail, hard-boiled eggs and deli meat on the ready. She also has bowls of fruits or veggies, and often eats raspberries and avocado.
Strength Training vs. Cardio
While many women focus on cardio to lose weight, it’s better to prioritize strength training. Cardio is so over-emphasized and other important things are getting overshadowed. If you enjoy it, it’s great if you want to run go for bike rides or other things you enjoy. But generally, we are steeped in the belief that when you exercise, it should be cardio-based and it’s for max calories. But that means we’re often overlooking how important our daily movement is outside of our workouts, and the important role of strength training.
If you’re constantly doing cardio, you aren’t making strength-training a priority. So I recommend flipping that on its head, and make movement and strength training the priority of the week, and filling in the gaps with the other stuff that you enjoy. Essentially, she recommends three days of full-body strength workouts, which leaves you with the majority of the week to do other things, whether that’s yoga, Pilates or cardio. There’s room for it all, but generally we aren’t intentional and strategic about it, which means we neglect strength which is one of the most important things.
The Significance of Sleep and Stress Management
Avant highlights the crucial role of sleep and stress management in weight loss. Lack of sleep can disrupt hormones, increase cravings for unhealthy foods, and reduce the likelihood of exercise. Chronic stress can also wreak havoc on the body, making weight loss more challenging.
Lack of sleep, in the short term, might not be a huge deal. But in the long run, when you’re under-rested, it has a whole cascade effect. When you’re tired, you’re less likely to exercise or move the rest of the day. You’ll also be more likely to crave hyper-palatable foods that don’t give you nutrients. You’re also more likely to rely on caffeine and then turn around and drink alcohol to help you wind down which impacts your sleep. Lack of sleep can also mess with your hormones and keep your cortisol constantly elevated, which keeps your nervous system in fight or flight.
Many women are in a chronic state of stress, which wracks havoc on bodies. You can do all the things, but if you address the underlying stress, it will make the process much easier and enjoyable.