Episode 75: Why “Calories In, Calories Out” Is Terrible Weight-Loss Advice

If losing weight were a simple math problem, I should have been great at it. I spent more than 20 years as an accountant. I understood the equation, eat fewer calories than you burn, and you'll lose weight. What I couldn't understand was why following that equation felt so much harder for me than it seemed to feel for other women. Why could someone else eat the same meal and feel completely satisfied while I was still hungry? Still thinking about food and wondering why I couldn't just stop. For years, I assume the difference came down to willpower. But the truth is calories in, calories out may describe part of what happens in the body, but it's far from explaining everything influencing it. Today, we're talking about what that equation gets right, what it leaves out, and why just eat less is not actually a useful weight loss strategy. But before we jump in, I do want to ask you to please take a moment to follow our subscribe to the show. Every follow in download helps us reach more women who need to hear these conversations and allows me to keep creating them. Thank you so much for your support friends. Now, let's get into it. Welcome to the Inspired Wellness Podcast, the show where we dive into what's really going on in your body as you journey through perimenopause and beyond. I'm the inspired wellness coach Michelle White, certified nutritional therapy practitioner, and I'm here to empower you to take control of your hormones, your health, and your life. This is the place for real talk about your changing body with practical tips and expert insight on balancing your hormones naturally. From nourishing your body with the right foods to embracing lifestyle shifts that bring you back to feeling amazing, we're breaking the silence and smashing the myths. Get ready to reclaim your energy, your confidence, and your sense of well-being because you deserve to thrive at every stage of life. Let's dive in. Hey friends and welcome back to Inspired Wellness Podcast. I'm Michelle White, the inspired wellness coach and a nutritional therapy practitioner, helping women in midlife stop chasing the body they used to have and start building the health, strength, and energy they want for the years ahead. Today is going to be one of our shorter episodes, no guest, no co-hosts, just you and me, and I want to talk about something that has honestly been a struggle for me for most of my life. And that is the idea of calories in calories out. Even saying that phrase can still be a little triggering for me because for years it made me feel like there was something wrong with me. The basic message was always, if you want to lose weight, eat fewer calories than you burn, that's it. It's simple math. And if you weren't losing weight, then you must be eating too much, moving too little or somehow not trying hard enough. I understood the equation. I have always understood the equation. I am not dumb. I get math. Heck, I was an accountant for 20 years. What I didn't understand was why it seemed so much harder for me to live it out than it did for some other women. I could look at a friend who appeared to eat the same amount I did, or sometimes more, and yet our bodies looked completely different. But honestly, the part that affected my confidence, even more than that, wasn't simply that our bodies were different. It was watching someone else eat part of a meal and then effortlessly deciding she was finished. Meanwhile, I could eat the exact same meal and still not feel satisfied. I would watch another woman push her plate away as if stopping were the easiest, most natural thing in the world. In fact, I'll never forget being at a dinner with a group of girlfriends when one of my friends, who has always been naturally thin and as so is pretty much every woman in her family, she said that she reaches a point during a meal when she just feels grossed out by the food and doesn't want anymore. And I remember thinking, I'm sorry, what? Because I was looking at the food, still sitting on her plate thinking, honestly, I kind of want a bite of that. She wasn't doing anything wrong, of course. That was simply the signal her body was giving her, but mine wasn't giving me the same signal. And I would wonder, why don't I feel that? Why does it take me so much longer to feel full? Why am I still thinking about the food when she has completely lost interest in it? Why can't I stop as easily as she can? And then, of course, the next thought was, what is wrong with me? I spent years trying to manage that through sheer mental control. I would tell myself, you need to stop eating now because if you keep going, you're going to feel absolutely miserable in an hour. And I was often right. An hour later, the physical fullness would finally catch up with me. But in the moment, I didn't feel satisfied. I felt like I was forcing myself to stop before my body had gotten the message that I had eaten enough. And that experience is one reason the calories and calories out conversation feels so personal to me. Because when we reduce weight management to a simple math problem, we leave out the person who is trying to live inside that equation. We leave out hunger, we leave out satiety, we leave out hormones, sleep, stress, muscle mass, food quality, dieting history, genetics, medications, blood sugar fluctuations, and all the signals constantly passing between the brain and the body. So today, I want to talk about what calories in, calories out gets right, what it leaves out, and how understanding the fuller picture really helped me develop a much healthier approach to food. And I'm also hoping it'll help you do the same. So first off, I don't want to replace one of really simplistic message with another. So let's start here, because calories do matter. There is science behind this. A calorie is a unit of energy and changes in body weight do involve energy balance. I'm not going to tell you that calories are imaginary or that you can consume unlimited amounts of any food without it affecting your body. But saying that calories matter is not the same as saying that managing weight is as simple as deciding to eat less. That's where I think we've gotten into trouble. The calories in, calories out equation describes what happens. It does not explain all the biological and behavioral factors influencing both sides of that equation. It's a little like looking at your bank account and saying, your balance went down because more money went out than came in. That may be mathematically correct, but it does not tell you why it happened. It doesn't tell you what expenses increased, whether your income changed, or what circumstances affected your decisions. In the same way, telling someone to eat less and move more doesn't address what is driving her hunger, how satisfied she feels after eating, how her body responds to restriction, how stress or sleep quality is affecting satiety, or what may be changing in her energy expenditure. It's an equation, not a complete strategy. And listen, hunger isn't the same for everyone. This is the piece I wish I had understood much earlier. Two people can eat the same number of calories and have a very different experience afterwards. One person may feel comfortably satisfied and barely think about food for the next four hours while the other person may finish the meal and immediately wonder what else she can eat. That doesn't automatically mean the second person lacks discipline. It may mean the meal or her body's response to it did not produce the same degree of satiety. Our appetite isn't controlled by one simple on and off switch. It is influenced by signals from the digestive system, the brain, fat tissue, the pancreas, and other parts of the body. It can also be affected by whether we slept well, or how stressed we are, or how much we've been dieting, the composition of the meal, and for women in midlife, the hormonal changes happening in the background. Even the speed at which we eat matters because fullness signals are not always immediate. I know this very personally. When it takes longer for satisfaction to register, being told listen to your body can be incredibly frustrating. I am listening to my body. My body is telling me it isn't satisfied. My body is telling me I need some chocolate before I can close out this eating session. And I'll tell you, this is one of the most common things I hear when I sit down with a woman for the first time. She doesn't open with, "I need a meal plan." She opens with, "I feel like I'm fighting myself all day." Almost every single time, when we actually look at what she's eating, how she's sleeping, what her stress level is, and what her body has been through over the last 20 years of dieting, there is a reason. There's always a reason. It's just very hard to see that from the inside. but that does not. not mean we are powerless. It does mean we may need better tools than simply trying to overpower hunger. So here's something I want you to know. First, imagine two meals that contain roughly the same number of calories. The first is a pastry and a sweetened coffee. The second is eggs, perhaps some turkey sausage or cottage cheese, vegetables, berries, and maybe a piece of whole grain toast. The calories could be very similar here, but those meals may create completely different experiences over the next several hours. The second meal provides more protein, more fiber, nutrients, and food volume. Your body also uses more energy digesting protein than it does digesting fat or carbohydrates. So you've got to keep that in mind. And more importantly for everyday life, that meal may help you feel satisfied longer. That matters because what happens after breakfast or whenever you eat your first meal does not stay confined to that one meal. If your first meal leaves you hungry an hour later, you may spend the rest of your morning trying not to snack. Then by lunch you're starving. You grab whatever is easiest, eat quickly, and possibly continue eating because satisfaction still has not caught up. That is not a moral failure. It may be a predictable response to beginning the day with a meal that didn't provide what your body needed to feel adequately nourished. This is actually one of the very first places I start with my clients when we discuss nutrition. And it surprises women every time because they come to me expecting me to take things away. And instead, the first thing we usually do is add more protein at that first meal, more fiber, enough fat to make it satisfying. And then within a week or two, a lot of women tell me the mid-morning hunger and three o'clock crash just stopped. Not because they got more disciplined, because their body finally got what it was looking for. This is why I care much more now about building a satisfying meal than simply trying to make it as low calorie as possible. When I was younger, I thought the best choice was always the option with the fewest calories. A tiny breakfast, a very light lunch, fat free, everything. And I would try to save as many calories as possible so I could use them later. But if the low calorie choice leaves you preoccupied with food, fighting cravings, and feeling deprived all afternoon, it is not the choice that serves you best. Sometimes eating a little more at a meal, especially more protein, fiber, or nourishing fat, can make it much easier to eat in a way that feels calm and intentional for the rest of the day. The other problem with the simple equation is that we imagine calories out as a fixed number. We reduce the calories from the inside and assume that the outside will stay exactly the same. But the body is not a calculator, it's an adaptive system. So when we repeatedly or aggressively restrict food, the body can respond in several ways. Hunger can increase. Food may become harder to stop thinking about. We may feel more tired. Our workouts may become less productive. We may unconsciously move less throughout the day. The body can also become more energy efficient, particularly after weight loss. This means it burns fewer calories doing the exact same activities. Again, this does not mean fat loss is impossible or that calorie balance does not matter. It means the body participates in the process. You are not adjusting numbers and a spreadsheet while your biology just sits quietly in the background. And from an evolutionary standpoint, that makes total sense to me. Our bodies were not designed to celebrate a calorie deficit. A prolonged lack of available energy could once have signaled a serious threat to our survival. So the brain has mechanisms that encourage us to find food when hungry and to conserve energy when restricted. That doesn't mean your body is broken or working against you. It means your body is trying to protect you. Even if those protective mechanisms feel incredibly unhelpful in our modern environment. Especially with the latest craze that Skeletor Skinny is a good look. Which, by the way, I do not agree with. And I do want to say something here because this is the part I can't fully cover in a single podcast episode. If you have a long history of dieting and most of us in midlife do, there's often another layer underneath all of this. Your minerals, your thyroid, your blood sugar, how much muscle you've held onto, what your stress load has been doing to you for the last decade. That is the layer I love digging into with women because that's usually where the why isn't this working for me? Answer actually lives. And it's very hard to AI your way to that. It is much easier when someone is looking at the whole picture with you. Also, I think it's important to briefly touch on the GLP ones here because the effectiveness of these medications has exposed an important truth about weight loss. Hunger is biological. These medications can reduce appetite, increase feelings of fullness, slow digestion, and quiet what many people describe as food noise. I hear a lot of people say I can finally stop eating without constantly fighting myself. And that really tells us something. If appetite were simply a matter of discipline interrupting those natural appetite signals through medication wouldn't make such a dramatic difference for so many people. And listen, this is not an episode about whether anyone should or shouldn't take a GLP1 medication. That is a very individual medical decision that you need to make with a qualified healthcare provider. And there is a lot of considerations that need to be taken into account. But I do think these medications help demonstrate that two people can experience hunger and fullness very differently. Now listen, that doesn't remove personal responsibility, but it should change the way we talk about it. And it should give us more compassion for ourselves and for other people that experience hunger differently. So what do I do with all of this? How has this knowledge helped me specifically? Because understanding the science is great, but at some point I still have to sit down and eat dinner. And for me, the biggest change has been shifting away from asking, how little can I eat? And towards asking, what does this meal need to help me feel nourished and satisfied? So protein is obviously a huge part of that for me. I build my meals around a meaningful source of protein instead of adding a few bites to a meal that's mostly carbohydrates. I also always try to include fiber rich plants and enough nourishing fat to make the meal satisfying. And I try to eat in an order and add a pace that gives my body time to register what's happening. That doesn't mean every meal is perfect or that I never eat past fullness. Of course I do. I am human and I still do not have that automatic off switch that some of my friends were clearly born with. But I no longer treat hunger as evidence that I'm failing. I try to get curious about it. So some questions that I ask are, did I eat enough protein? Was the meal satisfying or was it simply low in calories? Did I barely eat all day and then expect myself to demonstrate perfect restraint at dinner? Did I sleep poorly last night? Am I stressed? Am I eating quickly or while distracted? Am I physically hungry or am I looking for comfort, stimulation or relief? These are literally the questions I walk my clients through and I'll be honest with you. Most women can't answer them at first. And trust me, it's not because they aren't smart. It is because they're too close to it. It took me years of self-research followed by a desire to get certified in nutritional therapy to see my own patterns clearly. It takes most of my clients about two conversations because someone else is looking at her situation and highlighting the key questions. And sometimes the answer is simply yes I am still hungry. And in that case I can choose to eat more without turning that choice into a judgment about who I am. I also know that mindfulness cues may take longer to catch up. So rather than demanding that I magically become the person who easily abandons half her dinner, I work with what I know about myself. I build a balance plate, I slow down when I can, I pause before automatically going back for more. And I remind myself that I can always go have more food in an hour if I'm truly still hungry. That feels completely different from telling myself you're not allowed to eat anymore. One is punishment and the other is a pause. That distinction has been really important for me, but finding those important distinctions is different for everyone. I wish I could go back and tell my younger self that struggling with hunger didn't mean I was weak. Having a different body from my friends didn't mean I was doing something wrong. And another woman's ability to leave food on her plate wasn't proof that she was more disciplined, more virtuous, or somehow better at being a woman. We can eat similar foods and have different bodies. We can follow similar patterns and get different results. We can even eat the same meal and experience completely different levels of satisfaction afterwards. However, that doesn't mean our choices don't matter. They absolutely do. But our choices do not happen in a biological vacuum. So, yes, calories matter, but protein matters, fiber matters, muscle matters, sleep matters, stress matters, hormones matter, food quality matters, your history of restriction even matters, and your individual experience of hunger and satisfaction matter. You are not simply a math equation. And if your entire approach to wellness requires you to spend every day fighting your own body, it probably isn't going to become your long-term solution. The goal isn't to find the fewest calories you can tolerate. The goal is to build meals and habits that help you feel nourished, satisfied, strong, and able to make supportive choices without constantly battling hunger. That is a much more compassionate approach, and it's also a much more practical one. Because the best strategy isn't the one that looks perfect on paper. It's the one you can actually live with. And I'll say this gently because I lived on the other side of it for a long time. You can absolutely piece this together on your own. I did, eventually. It just took me about 20 years, a lot of energy and a certification to get there. It does not have to take you that long. I am here to cut out that time and energy and help women get there much faster than I did. So friends, thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I really hope it was helpful. And before you go, I do want to tell you what I actually do, because if today's episode had you thinking, "Okay, but what does this actually look like for me specifically?" That is exactly the work I love. I work with women one-on-one in two ways. The first is the Inspired Wellness Program. That is my one-on-one coaching program. It's for the woman who is ready to stop guessing and rebuild her foundations for real. We take eight weeks and we look at the whole picture. Your nutrition, your protein, your blood sugar, your sleep, your stress, your minerals, your history. And we build a plan that fits your actual life. Not a plan that looks good on paper. One, you can actually live with. The second is my focused wellness reset. That one is shorter and more targeted. A more personalized experience for the woman who wants to help fine-tune one or two specific concerns. So maybe it's exactly what we talked about today. Hunger and satiety and building meals that actually work for you. Maybe it's your energy, maybe it's your sleep or your afternoon crashes. If you don't need a full overhaul, but you do want expert eyes on one or two things, this is the one for you. So if either of those sound like what you need, there are two easy ways to reach out to me. You can head on over to my website, theinspiredwellnesscoach.com, and use the Reach Out option there to send me a message. Or, and honestly, this one is probably the quicker way to get to me. You can just email me directly at Michelle, that's M-I-C-H-E-L-L-E, at theinspiredwellnesscoach.com. That one comes straight to my inbox, and I answer all of those emails myself. So either way works, I truly love to hear from you, even if it's just to tell me where you're stuck. And in the meantime, if you're loving these episodes, there are a few things that help me out more than you know. Make sure you're following the show so you never miss one, and share this episode with a friend, especially if it made you think of a woman who has spent years blaming herself for struggling with food or weight. Please send it to her, I wish someone had sent me something like this 20 years ago. Sometimes, simply understanding that there is more happening beneath the surface lifts a little of that chain. And if you have a minute, leave me a rating or a review. Those are always you can support me and help me get in front of more women like you who would find this information helpful. So truly, thank you. And if you have a question or a topic you want me to cover on one of these shorter episodes, email me. I want these to feel like a conversation we would have sitting together over coffee. So until next time, take care of yourself and remember that your body needs support, not punishment.