Can't Lose Fat Over 40? Why Muscle Is the Missing Piece

Nikkiey: You don't have a fat loss problem. You have a muscle problem. Until you fix the muscle problem, the fat loss problem will never go away. I want to talk about that and exactly what I mean by that in this episode.

You can't have toned muscle without properly fueling your body with the right nutrition. Fat tissue does not do any of what I just said. Fat just sits there. This means the more muscle that you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate, the more calories that your body burns doing absolutely nothing. Because a woman with more muscle can eat more food. I eat over 2,500 calories in a day, sometimes 3,000.

What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott. On these episodes, we talk about mindset, methodologies and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong and feel insanely confident. My friends, I've got a good one for you today. I'm going to lean in on this one.

I want to talk about why I feel like the vast majority of women are approaching fat loss completely backwards, and why I believe the fitness industry, the very industry that is actually supposed to be helping you, is largely responsible for this and responsible for keeping you stuck.

You guys know my story. I've been in this space for a really long time, over a decade now. And WarriorBabe has helped over 100,000 women get out of what they have been told and out of following the norms of the fitness industry, and get them on a different path, the honest way, to get them to the body composition, and not only the body composition, but the health and the standards and the vitality and the lifestyle that they want to live.

I think about it like two roads. The majority of people are walking down this one, and the fitness industry is telling them all these things. I'm trying to grab as many women as I can from this road and steer them onto this other road. We've helped 100,000 women so far, and we are not stopping.

You guys know that I've competed in bodybuilding. I won three shows. I left undefeated, all natural. I've been polygraph tested, the whole nine yards. I left a nursing career to build WarriorBabe because I saw how badly women were being served by the information available to them. And after all of that, the thing I want to say most clearly and most directly to every woman listening to this right now is: you don't have a fat loss problem. You have a muscle problem. And until you fix the muscle problem, the fat loss problem will never go away. So I want to talk about that and exactly what I mean by that in this episode.

Let me paint the picture, because I know some of you are going to recognize yourself or someone that you love in this. When a woman decides she wants to lose fat, she wants to look leaner, she wants to feel better, she wants to change her body, she does what the fitness industry has told her to do for decades. She cuts her calories, usually pretty aggressively. She adds cardio, a lot of it.

And I say this because that was me over a decade ago. I wasn't eating enough. I changed my eating habits away from sugary things and started focusing on more protein, but I still wasn't eating enough food. And if you guys know my story, I ran three half marathons within the first half of the year in 2015.

I say this because if you find yourself in this description, I know, because I was there too. I'm talking daily treadmill, cycling classes, step counts, burning as many calories as possible. This person probably eats less. She moves more, in the cardio sense. She stays away from heavy weights because she doesn't want to get too bulky. Guys, I'm saying all of this because it was me. Maybe she does some light toning work, like resistance bands and light dumbbells and a Pilates class. You guys know how I feel about that from the previous episode that I just recorded about a Pilates class.

She wants to change her body. She's waiting for her body to change. And it does, and it will for a little bit. The scale will go down. She's going to lose weight. She feels like it's working, but then it stops. The scale stalls. And this is what happens with the majority of women: they push harder and push harder and push harder. They eat less. They do more cardio. The scale moves a little bit more. Then it stalls again. Then she's exhausted. Then she's hungry all the time. Her energy is in the ground.

She looks smaller, but she doesn't look the way that she expected she would look. No definition, not leaner, not toned, just less of what she was before. So she cuts more, pushes more, restricts more. And her body at this point has lost significant muscle mass in this whole process. The body has lost muscle mass because it's going into it for energy reserves. It's tanked its metabolic rate. It's been running on cortisol for months. And then the body just stops responding entirely.

This is not a you problem. This is because of all the things that the industry has been telling you that you need to do for decades and decades, over and over and over again. And it's still doing it, because it's just repackaging things and putting them out differently. This is the predictable, inevitable outcome of an approach that was broken from the very beginning. You went after the fat loss process without building the thing that actually burns it.

So I need you guys to understand something that the diet industry has spent decades actively obscuring, because if you understood it, you would stop buying their products. Muscle is your metabolic engine. Every pound of muscle on your body burns calories at rest. Not during exercise: at rest. So me sitting here recording this podcast, because I have muscle mass, I'm burning calories. Sitting at your desk, sleeping, watching TV, muscle is metabolically active, and it demands energy to maintain itself around the clock.

Key note: energy. It demands energy. Where do you guys think that energy comes from? Food. Nutrition. It needs that in order to maintain itself, to build itself, to get that toned look you want. It needs that food. You can't have toned muscle without properly fueling your body with the right nutrition. Fat tissue does not do any of what I just said. Fat just sits there.

This means the more muscle that you have, the higher your resting metabolic rate, the more calories that your body burns doing absolutely nothing, the easier fat loss becomes, and the easier it is to maintain once you get there. For me, my body is just passive at this point. Yes, I put in the work and still go to the gym because it's part of my lifestyle. Yes, I still eat healthy. But my body maintains itself because of the lifestyle that I live, and also because of the muscle mass that I have, and the calories my body is burning from having more muscle mass on it. You don't have to be as muscular as me, if some of you think that's too much. But in general, my point is you need to focus on building muscle.

On the flip side, every pound of muscle that you lose, your metabolism slows down. Your body needs less energy. The same food that you've always been eating starts producing different results. Fat storage at this point becomes easier. Fat loss now becomes harder. And a spiral of eating less and less and less to maintain the same result begins.

This is exactly what chronic cardio and calorie restriction without strength training produces. When you go into doing more and more and more, like that person I described a couple of minutes ago, you are losing weight, but it's composed of you losing both fat and muscle. And then you will get a smaller body with a slower metabolic engine, and a woman who wonders why she has to eat 1,100 calories to maintain a weight that she used to maintain at 1,800 calories. This is why. Your metabolism didn't betray you. It didn't just stop working. You unknowingly dismantled it, one cardio session and one skipped strength training session at a time, slowly bringing it down over time, because people do this for six months to a year, or for years, decades.

And this is what boggles my mind: when people are three months into a program and they expect the results to happen in their body. Do you understand that you just spent a decade doing this to your body? You cannot expect something to change in three months.

The truth that changes everything here is that the goal is not to be smaller. The goal is to have less body fat and more muscle. Those are not the same outcome, and they do not require the same approach.

Quick break. If you're finding this episode helpful so far, it would mean a lot if you could hit pause for just a second, leave a quick rating or review, or share it with someone who could benefit from it. Your support helps more women discover these tools to build muscle, lose fat and feel confident. Thank you so much for being a part of this journey with me.

So to lose fat and keep it off permanently and sustainably, like I said with the two roads, walking down the WarriorBabe way with the vitality and the lifestyle and sustainability, without living on the side of restriction and cardio for the rest of your life, you need to build muscle first, or you need to do it simultaneously. You need to make muscle the foundation of your approach, not an afterthought. Because a woman with more muscle can eat more food. I eat over 2,500 calories in a day, sometimes 3,000. Isn't that what we all want too?

I remember when I first started my journey, I didn't want to have to eat less. I wanted to learn how to eat more. I just didn't believe it was possible, because with eating more, you see obesity and all these things happening in the world, and you tie some type of belief to it. But when you start taking the action and you start eating more, you start seeing the results, and you're like, wow, this is actually possible. Because more muscle means you can eat more food. You can train harder, you can recover faster, you can maintain your results without having to push your way through every single meal or every single workout. I once trained six days a week. Now I only have to train three days a week. That is a body composition that lasts, and you cannot calorie restrict and cardio your way into it.

So let me be direct about this, because I think women deserve to understand why they have been given the wrong information for so long. I've talked about this in previous podcasts, but I'll lean into it again. The fitness industry has known for decades that women are afraid of building muscle. It's everybody's comment: I don't want to get too bulky. I'm afraid of getting too big. I'm afraid of looking too masculine. Afraid of the weight room, afraid of lifting weights.

And instead of educating women out of that fear, instead of giving them the truth about what building muscle actually does for a woman's body, the industry leaned into it. It built entire products, entire categories, around that fear. Diet programs with no strength training component. Cardio-only fitness classes marketed, like I said about the Pilates studio I went to, as a path to a lean body. Low-load, high-rep workouts sold to you as toning and sculpting. And it's this endless calories in, calories out. Everything's about burning calories, never about building the tissue that burns them automatically.

The uncomfortable truth I'm trying to portray about the diet and fitness industry is this: a woman who builds muscle, understands her nutrition and maintains her results long-term is not a repeat customer. But a woman who loses weight through restriction and cardio, gains it back, does this whole yo-yo approach, can't sustain it and then starts over? Guess what. She's what the industry loves.

The revolving door of the diet industry is not a failure of the industry. It is literally the whole business model. You know how big the fitness industry is, billions of dollars. And women have been paying for it with their time, their money, their health and their confidence for decades, generations.

There are so many women that say WarriorBabe is so expensive. I promise you that this will be the last program that you have to do, if you put in the effort, because we are about having our babes graduate programs and leave feeling educated and understood. They get their body, they get nutrition, and they get what builds muscle. I'm not willing to participate in this diet industry. I've never been willing to participate in that.

And that is why every single thing that we do at WarriorBabe is built on the exact opposite premise. Build the muscle first, fuel your body, understand the process, create the habits that get you these results, and then create results that last, because that foundation is now set: solid, real, concrete, unbreakable.

You guys can probably feel my energy through this. I'm hot on this stuff because I don't want WarriorBabe to fall into the mix of the entire weight loss and diet industry. I want it to stand apart. I want it to be different, and we are. I want to grab more women and put them on this path, going this way, breaking down all your fears, your limiting beliefs, the narratives in your mind, the things that you have been programmed to believe over the years and decades, which is not your fault, and squashing them.

I joke around inside the WarriorBabe community about Men in Black, the zap that wipes your memory. It's a running joke inside the community. I want to do that to every single woman on this earth and get them walking down this other path.

To piggyback off of that, total rant here: there's this new movie out, The Sheep Detectives. Remember Lily the sheep, if you've seen it? It's so good. I'm sure your kids or grandkids would absolutely love it too. If you've never seen it, I highly recommend it. When something bad or uncomfortable happens, like in this situation where the diet industry has gotten into their heads, Lily tells the other sheep in the herd to forget. They count to three, and then they forget. So I want to do that for the majority of women and get them on the right path to understanding the things that they need to do.

So practically, here's what the approach actually looks like.

One: stop making cardio the centerpiece of everything.

Two: start lifting, and actually lifting. Not resistance bands, not three-pound dumbbells, not reformer springs. External load: dumbbells, barbells, cable machines that challenge your muscles beyond what they can already do. Doing compound movements: squats, deadlifts, rows, hip hinges, hip thrusts, presses, lunges. Those exercises recruit the largest muscle groups, they create the most significant training stimulus, and they produce the body composition changes that you actually want to see.

And you've got to do that three, four times a week. You don't need to be in there six days a week, and you don't need to be in there for three hours a session. You just have to be consistent with it. Make it a 45-minute in and out, and you deserve that time to yourself. For those of you that say, I don't have enough time: you have enough time. You just have to make it fit on your calendar and make it a priority, because this stuff matters if you want to live a long life.

Back to the cardio. Cardio has a place. It is very important for your cardiovascular health. Walking is one of the best things that you can do for your body. But if cardio is the foundation of your fat loss strategy, and you're spending more time on the treadmill than you are lifting weights, then you have the priorities backwards. Use cardio as a tool. Do it for two or three sessions a week, or focus on just getting your step count in. But you don't need to do it every single day.

And you've got to fuel your muscle. Energy, fuel, nutrition. You cannot build what you cannot fuel. So you have to give your body that protein. Without that, the training signal, the muscle protein synthesis, nothing is going to fuel that process happening internally. When women start lifting and adjusting their protein, they see incredible results in a matter of four to six weeks.

So eat enough. If you don't want to start tracking your macros, you don't have to, but more importantly, just make yourself get more protein. Stop being afraid of food. Stop being afraid of getting too bulky. You're not trying to be smaller. You're not trying to shrink here. You are trying to build. And that requires you to strength train, lift heavy and eat food, the right types of food.

And get off that scale. Ladies, get off that scale. Throw it away. Focus on non-scale victories: how much stronger you're getting, your photos changing, how you're feeling in your clothes. That number is not going to tell you the full story. Stop letting that single number tell you whether you are or are not succeeding.

So what I want to leave you with today is this: weight loss is not the goal. Fat loss, and I've talked about the difference between the two, is the goal, but that requires different strategies than weight loss. Body composition, recomposition, is the goal. Less body fat, more muscle. And you get there by building, not by getting smaller, not by shrinking.

Some of you have probably been like, yeah, I've lost weight, but I have no muscle definition. Yeah, because the majority of things out there will get you there. You've become a smaller, fatter version of yourself. Skinny fat. This is everything I'm talking about here. The approach that most women are using, restrict, do cardio, avoid heavy lifting, repeat, does not produce the outcome you want when it comes to a lean, toned body. It produces temporary weight loss, followed by your metabolism slowing down, followed by you doing this loop over and over and over again. It's just a broken strategy. That's what it is.

The right strategy, the one that has always worked and will always work, is that you build muscle, you fuel it correctly, and you let the fat loss happen. It's not the other way around. Build muscle first.

And for any limiting belief or fear that comes along with it, go check out WarriorBabe. Get yourself inside the community. Get yourself inside our products. Get yourself immersed in our education and learnings, because I promise you that is going to change the way that you think about this process moving forward. And your mindset is one of the first starting points that's going to help you be successful. All right? Love you guys, and I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

Hey, really quick. Before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take just a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all of the difference, helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much.