How to Balance Hormones With Nutrition for Fat Loss

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So what hormones are is they are the chemical messengers that travel through your bloodstream to your tissues and to your organs, helping those tissues and those organs to perform their functions. Key hormones like insulin, cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, those are the ones specifically that need to be in balance for your body to function optimally.

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Hey, everyone. What's going on? Welcome back to The WarriorBabe Show with Nikkiey Stott, co-founder of WarriorBabe. On this podcast, we talk about mindset, methodologies, and tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. I'm your host, Nikkiey Stott. And welcome to today's episode, episode 172, where I want to talk about an essential topic when it comes to your fitness journey: how a proper diet helps hormones and how improper diets can seriously mess them up.

I get this question all of the time, why nutrition is so freaking important. And there's so many ways to unpack that question. So I want to dive into this episode today with you guys talking about that, and talking about how, in relation to having a proper diet, you will have a balanced hormonal profile. And when you have a balanced hormonal profile, that is going to get you the ultimate results that you want with changing your body composition and with building muscle, and with making sure that the muscle building process and the growth process and achieving the fat loss and all of the things are in alignment when your hormones are in alignment. And the way that you get your hormones in alignment is if you're eating the right way and you're eating enough food to regulate those processes that are happening inside of your body.

Hormones play a crucial role in regulating many of our body's processes, from our metabolism to our appetite to our mood to, for women, reproductive health. But your diet can significantly impact that balance, right? So what I want to dive into today is what you can eat, what you should eat, and what specific hormones play a role in this.

So let's just start with a basic understanding of what hormones are. And like I normally try to do with all these podcasts, I'm going to try and keep it super high level without getting too sciencey. So what hormones are is they are the chemical messengers that travel through your bloodstream to your tissues and to your organs, helping those tissues and those organs to perform their functions. Key hormones like insulin, cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, those are the ones specifically that need to be in balance for your body to function optimally.

There's tons and tons of other ones. Growth hormone is really important when it comes to you guys building more muscle and being more toned. But those are some of the key ones that balance your body to function optimally. And your diet, like I mentioned, what you eat on a regular basis, is a major player in keeping those hormones balanced.

So insulin, that hormone regulates your blood sugar levels. It helps your cells to absorb glucose, absorbing energy or absorbing it for storage. Balanced insulin levels are crucial for preventing diabetes later on in life. Many of you guys get tested for your A1C. And if your A1C is showing that you're pre-diabetic, this is because your insulin levels probably aren't being regulated on a regular basis. And when you have balanced insulin levels, it also helps to maintain your energy throughout the day. So that's insulin.

Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. And if your cortisol is elevated, then it's much easier for your body to store body fat and harder for you to get rid of it. Cortisol helps your body to control the use of the fats, the proteins and the carbohydrates. It also regulates your blood sugar. I'm sorry, it also regulates your blood pressure, and it reduces inflammation. Proper cortisol levels, when you have them in alignment, when you have a beautiful curve, if you ever get the tests done, are so important. People sometimes have flatline cortisol or they have no curve whatsoever. When you have a nice cortisol curve, your cortisol is usually spiked in the morning, and then throughout the day it gradually lowers, and it's supposed to be low before you go to bed at night. That is really key for managing stress and maintaining overall health.

Then there's estrogen and there's testosterone. Those are sex hormones that are essential for reproductive health, for bone density, for muscle mass. And having balanced levels of those supports mood, energy, physical performance, all of the things. And especially for those aiming for a toned body, for building muscle, estrogen, testosterone, mainly testosterone, and growth hormone are especially important when it comes to achieving those types of goals.

Testosterone, even in women, we have a smaller amount than men do. So for those of you guys that feel like, oh, if I lift weights, I'm going to get too bulky, that's not true. We don't have as much testosterone as men do, so we can't build muscle mass as fast as men can. But it's still really, really freaking important for us, because if we want to be toned and if we want to build more muscle, we have to have good, balanced levels of testosterone. And not only does it play a role in muscle development, it also plays a role in fat distribution.

And growth hormone is influenced by nutrition and exercise, which is so important because growth hormone tends to decrease as you age. And that's because your nutrition is off, or you're not doing appropriate exercises or strength training. Having growth hormone in balance, and having the right nutrition protocol and the right exercise protocol, is what aids in muscle growth and repair.

And when these hormones are in balance, your body operates so freaking smoothly, you guys. It allows you to achieve the result that you want. It allows you to get that toned body. It allows you to have the muscular physique. It allows you to be happy with the progress moving forward. But when those hormones are out of whack, it leads to a range of health issues. That's why a lot of women feel fatigued, because their hormones are out of whack.

And this is the thing, you guys. You can't see this externally. You could go throughout your entire life thinking that you feel good, or you could think that as you continue to age, the feelings that you start to feel are just a natural part of your aging process. That is not true. When I hear women say that they're fatigued, or they have weight gain in unwanted areas, or they're experiencing mood instability, or a plethora of different things that I've heard throughout the years, and they attribute it to their age and getting older, I always have to interject. And I'm like, that is not the case. You do not have to feel this way as you age. There's things internally that are off, out of balance, out of whack, and that's why you're experiencing this day to day.

And again, I guess in some senses you do see this externally because of the results that show in your body. But the point I'm trying to get across is that people attribute it to aging, and that does not have to be the case. Some people just don't think about their hormonal profile. They don't think about their hormones. And I think this is something the fitness space is doing a better job at, recognizing the internal.

I always say to our WarriorBabes, we can give you the protocol. We can give you the nutrition protocol. This is why we recently partnered with Equi.Life and Dr. Cabral. You guys have heard Dr. Cabral, he's been on the podcast before. I'm going to have to bring him back on. But earlier this year, we partnered with them because we knew that the missing puzzle piece with WarriorBabe was getting the hormones tested and having our babes have the support of their labs being tested on the way into WarriorBabe. And then we're able to see that lab work and really personalize a protocol for nutrition and for workouts and all of the other things in terms of habits, sleep, water, that are going to help to fix the... not discrepancies, but... what's the word I'm looking for? This word always slips my mind. But you guys know what I mean. Fix the things that are off balance to get them back into balance. And so all of our babes now have this hormonal profile on the way into WarriorBabe, that we get to have access to, to facilitate the right protocol.

But like I say all the time, we can give macros. We can give workouts. We can help you with your mindset. We can break barriers in terms of limitations that you are telling yourself and get you out of your own way. But I'm even experiencing this with a few of my personal clients that I still work with to this day. I don't take on new clients. And I know that our coaches experience this as well.

I'm going on a rant right now, but just stay with me, because next I'm going to dive into what a proper diet looks like to help with hormonal health and muscle building, and then the impact of an improper diet on hormones and muscle development.

But with my personal clients right now, we've gone three years together. And you actually probably heard this in the podcast that was released last week. I'm filming this one before it goes live, so this podcast is going live next week. In the podcast I'm talking about, you'll hear me talk about my client who was experiencing this. After three years of working together, we kind of hit a wall. There were no more adjustments to macros that I could make. There were no more different types of strength training protocols I could do. This was something deeper. Her hormones were out of whack. Her thyroid was trash. It was complete trash, which her doctor told her. And if your thyroid is trash, it makes it really hard to achieve the physical results with your body. If hormones, thyroid, all of the things are out of whack and they're not addressed, it's hard.

So this is the final puzzle piece of what we brought in this year. Okay, we can do the nutrition. We can do the strength training. But we need an expert in the space who can help us with the hormonal profiles of these women, so that we can really get down to the nitty-gritty of what needs to be addressed, what needs to be worked on, and how we can get everything in the body balanced so that externally we can get the results that the client wants.

So anyway, to go on a tangent, if these are out of whack, if your insulin is out of whack, your growth hormone, your testosterone, your estrogen, your thyroid, your cortisol, especially your cortisol... Cortisol is a fat-storing hormone, so it makes it really hard. Like I said, if your cortisol is elevated or flatlined, your body wants to store body fat and it wants to hold on to it. And when you have the right balance of cortisol, it helps to control your body's use of those fats so it doesn't hold on to them. It uses them in the way it's supposed to. It uses protein the way it's supposed to. It uses carbohydrates the way it's supposed to. But if you're stressed to the nines, which a lot of freaking people are, and not a lot of people know what their cortisol levels are actually like, it's going to be really hard to...

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...push forward physically with the results you want to see with your body. So it's really important to get this testing. And again, if you want help, I've said this in all the podcasts: WarriorBabe. If you want to know deeper hormonal profiles for yourself, check out WarriorBabe. Then one of our expert coaches will be able to put together the plan that you need based on the results that we get from that type of saliva testing, moving forward to get you the results that you want. Anyway, the link is in the description, or warriorbabe.com/apply. All right, let's get into the rest of the podcast.

So when you have a proper nutrition protocol, I want to talk about how the nutrients that you're eating, what your body needs, help to produce and regulate hormones efficiently and effectively. And it supports both your overall health as an individual and the process by which you want to build muscle, or need to build muscle.

Okay. So healthy fats. Hormones are made from fats. So consuming healthy fats like omega-3s from fish, flax seeds, even down to nuts like walnuts, can support your hormonal production. And I'm going to get into this without getting too ahead of myself, because I'm also going to talk about the impact of the improper diet. Having the right amount of fats helps to reduce inflammation. It helps to improve insulin sensitivity. And it's crucial for muscle recovery and for muscle growth. And again, like I said, healthy fats are how hormones are made. So if you aren't consuming the type of fats that you need to on a regular basis, or you think that you need a diet that is lower in fat because it's going to make you less fat, that's not true. You need a healthy balance of fats.

Typically, what I look for in women to put them at a fat range with their macros, depending on where you're at and what phase we're in, whether you're cutting or in maintenance, can range from 55 grams to upwards of 85 grams. Especially if you're going through menopause, your fat grams are going to need to be a little bit higher to support the hormonal changes as you go through this phase of life. So it's really freaking important to have healthy fats in your everyday protocol.

Protein. Adequate protein intake helps to balance insulin levels throughout the day and supports muscle maintenance, which in turn helps with hormonal balance. When you are eating enough protein throughout the day, protein is what helps keep you feeling satiated and fuller longer. And it helps to eliminate any type of insulin spikes you would have throughout the day. When you're eating protein as you should, maybe 30 grams of protein per meal, depending on where your protein levels are, and I'll talk about that in a second, this is what will help you come the end of the night and be like, oh, I'm satiated, I'm not hungry.

For those of you guys that get to the end of the night and you're like, oh my god, I'm just so hungry, I feel like I could eat anything and everything, even though you've had balanced meals throughout the day, you probably weren't eating enough protein in those meals to make you feel satiated. And now all of a sudden you're having spikes at the end of the night and you want to eat all of the things, because you didn't give your body what it wanted throughout the day.

So it is so important to eat enough protein for those reasons, but also because consuming enough protein stimulates the release of growth hormone, which, as I talked about a couple minutes ago, is so important and vital for muscle development. Growth hormone is heavily influenced by nutrition and by exercise. And that hormone is what helps to grow and repair muscle. And growing and repairing muscle is what's going to get you toned. So when you don't have enough protein, and a lot of people don't have enough protein throughout the day, you aren't able to stimulate growth hormone release as much as somebody who is eating enough protein throughout the day.

So protein is king. Protein is the macronutrient god over fats and over carbohydrates, if I was to argue that. The amount of protein you should be consuming in a day is around your body weight or more. Now, for those of you guys that may be 250 pounds, I wouldn't necessarily say, hey, you need to go eat 250 grams of protein a day. That's going to be astronomically overwhelming and you're not going to be able to do it. So that's where I would maybe drop down to 0.8 times your body weight, and that's what you would eat in grams of protein in a day.

For me, for example, I'm 150 pounds, so I would eat around 150 grams of protein in a day. But let's say I was going into a cut and I needed to maintain my muscle mass and keep it intact as I decrease body fat. Then I would probably increase my protein to 1.1 or 1.2 grams per pound of body weight. So it totally depends on you as an individual. And that's what is freaking awesome about working with a coach, because we can see that. We can put our professional education into play and give you the protocol that you need to be following.

But most importantly, a lot of the women that I see, that come into WarriorBabe and that our coaches coach, are eating 60 grams of protein in a day. And I just want you guys to think about how this plays a huge factor in you getting the results that you want. Protein deficiency is a mass epidemic in the fitness space. Not a lot of women eat enough protein on a regular basis. And that is why not a lot of women look the way they want to look, because protein is such a huge component of getting the physique that you want. It stimulates the things internally to operate and function as they should, to get you the results you want on the exterior. It's not just that protein stimulates these things. It stimulates the hormones that balance out the processes that get you the results you want externally.

And I don't want to ignore how important carbohydrates are in this process. They are what give you the energy to go perform the lifts that you need to stimulate the processes to build muscle.

Fiber is really important. Getting fruits and vegetables and whole grains. They help regulate blood sugar levels and they support gut health, and those are really important for hormonal balance. Fiber can slow the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream, and this can prevent insulin spikes throughout the day. This also promotes a stable environment for muscle growth.

And then, of course, our micronutrients. I know this is The WarriorBabe Show, and I talk about all the macronutrients like protein, fats, and carbs. But our micronutrients are also very important. Vitamins and minerals, vitamin D, magnesium, zinc. Those are all super essential for hormone production and function. Magnesium helps you to regulate your cortisol. So if you guys are high-stress individuals, that's going to help you bring down those cortisol levels. Vitamin D is extremely important for healthy levels of estrogen and testosterone and supports muscle strength and function.

So if I was to recommend any type of supplement on a daily basis, these are the two that I take regularly. I take magnesium, the Pure brand. I take two pills at night, two tablets, whatever you want to call them. I don't even know what you call it. I take that at night before I go to bed. And I take vitamin D in the morning. What I just recently learned, though, is you want to take vitamin D with K-something. K2, K3, one of those. You don't want to just take vitamin D by itself. I also take vitamin D from the Pure brand too.

So those are the overall ways that micronutrients, macronutrients and fiber, making sure that you have those in your day-to-day and you're consuming enough of them, are going to support your hormonal health, your overall health, muscle building, and achieving the results that you want for your body.

Now, I want to touch on the impact of an improper diet. An improper diet just wreaks havoc on your hormones, and it won't get you the results that you want with muscle development. I kind of talked about it with inadequate protein, and I kind of talked about it with inadequate fats, but I'm just going to touch on it again. If your diet is less than ideal, an improper diet can wreak havoc on your hormones. It can lead to a range of health issues and it can hinder muscle development.

So for those of you guys, and this was me before I started my journey, I loved sugar. Like I talked about in episode one, I was the type of person that ate a bag of Smarties in one sitting. Before I decided to start my fitness journey cold turkey, I went to Wawa, which is a local convenience store, a gas station, around here in PA. And I got the strawberry milkshake and I would get candy. This was me before my fitness journey took off. And I know that this is a lot of individuals as well. I get it. Sugar is so addicting.

But excess sugar and processed foods lead to insulin resistance, which disrupts other hormones like estrogen and testosterone. Processed foods like this, I used to do the Lean Cuisines, the frozen dinners, contain unhealthy fats and additives that further disturb your hormonal balance. This can lead to increased inflammation in the body. This can interfere with insulin's function. It makes all of the things that you want to accomplish, like muscle recovery, muscle growth and losing body fat, way more difficult. So that is one area.

The second area is not having enough healthy fats. Your body can't produce hormones effectively without healthy fats, as I just mentioned. And this leads to an imbalance and affects everything from your mood to your metabolism to hormone production, and it hinders muscle growth. So have enough healthy fats in your day-to-day.

I just posted this on my Instagram a couple days ago: people think they have to eat less fat in order to lose fat. And that's not true. If you just have the right balance of each of the macronutrients that your body needs to perform optimally, you will lose body fat. People think that you need to eat less to lose more, or that eating fat is going to make you more fat. No. What is going to make you more fat is consuming too many calories in a day, or not enough calories, so that your body goes into starvation mode, holds on to things and stores more body fat. It's about having the right balance of the macronutrients that you need to accomplish your goals. So that was fats.

Protein, I talked about it. Not getting enough protein in your day, as I mentioned, causes insulin spikes. It causes crashes. It leads to imbalanced insulin levels and increased cortisol, which stores more body fat. It leads to improper function and production of your thyroid hormone, which regulates your metabolism and your energy levels, which are both extremely critical for muscle building.

And then overall, a diet lacking in essential vitamins and minerals, like having low magnesium levels, impairs the production of the hormones that we mentioned: insulin, cortisol, estrogen, testosterone, growth hormone. You guys don't understand how severely all of these things impact what is going on in your body.

There's some people that barely eat in a day. There's some people that have one meal a day, or just use the excuse of, I'm too busy and I don't have enough time to eat. If those are the things that are going on with you, this is what's going to happen. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, maybe not in one month, but I guarantee you doing this for years on end is going to lead to something happening with your health in 10, 15, 20 years. So if you can just get this right now, you are being proactive for yourself, without having any of the symptoms you may develop, so that you don't have to be reactive later on in life.

All of these imbalances I'm talking about literally start from what you eat on a daily basis and how much you consume on a daily basis. All of these imbalances lead to symptoms like fatigue, which is what a lot of women experience. Unwanted weight gain, which is what a lot of women experience. Mood swings, which is what a lot of women experience. And even more serious health conditions if left unchecked.

The weight gain, the mood swings, the fatigue. This is what I said earlier in the podcast, where you guys think that this is just a normal process of aging. That you're going to feel tired. That you're going to have unwanted weight gain. That you're going to experience mood swings. That you're not going to have enough energy. That is not due to your age. That is due to the hormones inside of your body being out of whack and not being balanced.

Proper nutrition is a powerful force and tool for maintaining hormone balance, supporting muscle growth, and your overall health. Women won't experience some type of external result in the first month, maybe even two months, when they come into WarriorBabe. But what they will experience, and I will put my life on this, is that their fatigue turns around. Their mood swings turn around. They have more energy. They're sleeping better at night, and they feel better than they did before WarriorBabe.

So just take this podcast and let it give you the wealth of knowledge you need to understand that it's not just the external results people want to go for. It's also getting the internal right so that you can achieve the external results that you want. It's about being proactive now rather than reactive later. And it's about understanding that age is just a number. What you're experiencing as you age isn't correlated with you getting older. It's correlated with what's going on inside of your body, and your body being like, yo, some things need to be addressed, and so it's giving you these types of symptoms.

Okay. I guarantee you a lot of people have some type of imbalance that they don't know they have. And you won't know you have it until you get it checked out. Until you do a saliva test. Until you do lab work. Until you routinely figure this stuff out. And that's exactly what happened in Lisa's podcast last week. If you haven't listened to it, go listen to it. It was released on Friday, July 5th. Go listen to that, because she was experiencing all of these things, and she didn't know she had anything wrong until she went and got tests done and took action on figuring it out.

All right. So if you guys need help, this is what we do at WarriorBabe. We now offer hormone testing. You guys do saliva testing. We get your A1C. We get your sex hormones. We get your cortisol. We get so much more. And then we can take that into account when we're giving you your protocol for your nutrition, your workouts, and all the other things we help you with along your fitness journey to get you the results that you want. But at WarriorBabe, it's not just the external results. It's also your overall health and your well-being.

All right, guys. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. It was actually one of my favorites that I've recorded lately. I enjoy sharing this type of information with you, because I think more women need to understand this kind of stuff. Nutrition really plays a pivotal role. It's not just about exercising, which a lot of you guys think it is. Like, I'm going to go do my workout today, I'm going to make sure I do five days of workouts this week. Nutrition is king. Exercise is queen. I've said that time and time again. But I think this podcast really elaborated on why nutrition is king and exercise is queen. Nutrition is the most important protocol that you can put in place for yourself on a daily basis. It's going to help so many things internally and externally for yourself.

Okay. Anyway, love you guys. And I'll see you in the next podcast. Peace out.