What Does Sustainable Fat Loss Look Like After 40?

Nikkiey: The way you look at sustainable training is that it has progressive overload in it. It includes rest, because there are so many women that just train seven days a week and they don't include a recovery day. If your training constantly leaves you feeling exhausted, inflamed, injured or burned out, that's not sustainable. So sustainability looks like progressive overload, recovery, rest, knowing when to push yourself and knowing when not to.

What's going on, my friends? Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show. Or if this is one of your first episodes, welcome to the 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.

Today's episode, episode number 342, I want to dive into unpacking what sustainable results actually look like. Because so many women say they want sustainable results, but if we're being really honest, most don't actually know what sustainable looks like. And I'm not saying that's your fault, or that you should know all these things, or that you need to know what sustainability looks like. What I'm saying is so many women are used to, or you are used to, what extremes look like. You are so used to what fast looks like. If this is you, you're so used to diving into a program, being consistent, then being inconsistent, trying to get back on track, finding the next thing to jump into because that program didn't work, because really you didn't work the program. So now you're looking for the next program to get into. And then you try and go all in, and you burn all the ships, and you go no carb. And then you're doing extremes. You're doing two-a-days. You're in the gym for three hours, right? A lot of women know what that world looks like.

But the sustainable side of it, I think that feels a little more unfamiliar. And that can feel almost underwhelming, because this one side of things is thriving on push, push, push, go, go, go, cut, restrict, extreme. So when you get into the sustainable side of things and you actually start implementing things that will apply to that result, it's very underwhelming. Okay. So I wanted to redefine it. I wanted to give you guys the real, the practical, the science-backed, lived-experience way. Because if you understand what sustainable truly looks like, you'll stop quitting something that's actually working for you.

All right. So let's start with what sustainable does not mean. It does not mean that you have 100% compliance with your macros every single week. It doesn't mean that you have zero missed workouts. It doesn't mean perfect sleep. It doesn't mean that you're never feeling bloated. It doesn't mean that you're never stressed. It doesn't mean that you never go off plan. That is some fantasy world. And that's also what a lot of programs or quick fixes promote. They promote this fantasy world. But it's not realistic, and it's not sustainable.

Sustainable means that you don't fall apart when life isn't ideal. It means if you miss a workout, you wake up the next day and you try and get the workout in that you missed, right? There are programs that talk about how you've got to get six workouts in a week, and that leaves only one day for you to have some makeup room, whereas hitting four workouts in a week is enough for any individual to be successful with.

So think about it. This actually happened to me last week, because we had a blizzard in Pennsylvania, and on Monday I wasn't able to get to the gym. Typically, I like to go Monday, Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday, Thursday, Pilates Friday, and then I'll go on Saturday. Or sometimes I'll go four days a week, which is Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Pilates Friday and Saturday. Because of the blizzard, I took off Monday. And that still allowed me to get in my workouts for the rest of the week, because I was able to just push my workouts back a day and rework when I was going to get to the gym to fit in my workouts, right?

So if you miss a workout, you just get back on to the next one. If you overshoot your calories, you just resume. There have been times where I have had a big breakfast, and then there have been days where I have not eaten anything after that, and then you get right back on track the next day. Or if you overshoot your calories in one meal, it's like, okay, at the next meal you can make the choice to just do better. If you have a stressful week, then you just need to keep to your minimum standards. Okay, I have a very stressful week. I just need to make sure I'm getting my steps in, drinking my water and getting to bed at an early time. Maybe it's a week that you don't get your workouts in, and that's okay.

Take me for an example. I'm 11 years into this. And even if I go off track, or I'm not aligned with the calories or the workouts of the week, I just get right back on track, say the next day or the next week. So the difference between someone getting results long term and someone who keeps restarting isn't your lack of discipline. It's your recovery time. How quickly do you recover from the imperfection? That's a skill. But at the same time, that's sustainability.

Because a lot of you guys are from the world of extremes, a lot of going all in, all or nothing. If you mess up, it's like, crap, I messed up the whole program, and now I need to go find something else so that I can be successful with that program from the start. But the same thing is going to keep happening over and over and over again. It's not that you need to give up on it. It's not that you need to keep restarting. It's like, okay, let me just honor the fact that I fell short, give myself grace. And then how can you recover from that, and how quickly can you recover from it? A perfect example is the one I already gave with one meal: if you mess up, get back on track at the next meal, get back on track the next day. It doesn't have to be, I'm going to start over on Monday. But it is a skill.

Okay. So I want to get scientific for a second, really quick. Your body is wired for survival. It's not wired for you to look good. It's not wired for aesthetics. So when you create a calorie deficit, your body increases your hunger hormone, ghrelin, and decreases your fullness hormone, which is leptin. It reduces your non-exercise movement subconsciously and lowers your metabolic rate slightly over time. And it increases your stress sensitivity. Okay. That is normal physiological stuff that happens to your body when you create a calorie deficit.

So when fat loss slows down, that is not you experiencing any type of failure. Let me put an example to the context of what I'm saying. Let's say you start a program, you put yourself into a calorie deficit and you're following it for three weeks, and all of a sudden fat loss slows down. That does not mean that the program is not working anymore. That does not mean that you failed. That does not mean that one of your mess-ups in those three weeks totally screwed everything up. That is just your body adapting.

And that is how sustainable fat loss works. It works with adaptation. It accounts for it. It doesn't crash harder. You don't need to cut more aggressively. You don't need to put yourself in the gym for three hours. You don't need to double down on your cardio. Your body just adjusts gradually. It will prioritize protein. It maintains the muscle. It protects your hormones. And because of that, it's slower. Fat loss starts to become slower. But slower means that you're preserving lean muscle mass. It means that you are protecting your metabolism.

Some of you guys, if you're starting this, hear me out. You start a program for three weeks, and you notice a lull. And it's different for everybody. It could be four weeks. It could be five weeks. Your macros could work for two, three months, and then you could experience a lull. It doesn't mean that it's not working anymore. It just means that your body has adapted and it needs a little more time.

Maybe some of you have heard of a whoosh, where you see a big drop in either body fat percentage or weight when you're tracking your progress. That says your body has adapted, and you didn't really change anything. It just needed time to catch up to the adaptation, to utilize its resources differently. As I'm saying here, it's protecting your metabolism. It's preserving lean muscle mass. It's finding different energy stores to pull from to continue to create fat loss. It's prioritizing your muscle, prioritizing protein, protecting your hormones, X, Y, Z.

Think about it like this. Sustainable fat loss might average 0.5 to 1 pound of loss per week. And some weeks it's going to be nothing. Some weeks water retention is going to mask your progress. Your period is going to mask your progress. Stress is going to mask your progress. Stress might spike your weight. Have you guys ever seen those graphs where in a one-week span, and I'm doing this with my hand, for those of you just listening on audio, it goes up, it goes down, it spikes up again, it spikes down, it goes up, it goes up, it spikes down, it spikes down, it goes up and it spikes down again, in like a week? But then you look at that same graph over six months, and the spikes are happening in a downward trend. That means you're still working, as long as you're going down in a downward trend.

And that's why some people give up so early on. Because they see these spikes, they see themselves maintaining the same weight, and they're like, what the heck, nothing is working. Yet if you just play the long game, and you continue to follow the program that you're on, being imperfect, and allowing yourself to make some errors and mistakes here and there, sustainably, over time, you're going to see a trend going down.

And the women that lose 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds and actually keep it off moved slower than they wanted to. But they knew mentally that this is part of the long game. It's just switching the mentality to accepting that you're on a long game, because you didn't get where you are in six months, if you have 20 or 30 pounds to lose. Or even if you're someone who's already lean and you're looking to lose the next five to 10 pounds, just think about the habits that you've developed over the years. Maybe there are just certain types of habits that need to shift, because clearly what you're doing now isn't working for you. So something new needs to change. That takes time. So if you allow yourself to accept that it's going to take time, your journey is going to be a little more fun and easy, and you're on the sustainable track at that point.

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Let's talk about the nutritional aspect of it. Sustainable eating isn't sexy. It's structured. It can be repetitive. It's predictable. Those three things I just said make it very powerful. I talked about this a couple of episodes before, but decision fatigue is real. When you're constantly trying new plans, trying new recipes, eliminating food, switching tracking methods, starting fresh, restarting cleanses, trying this new detox tea, trying what this person is recommending on social media, and you're trying something new every week, you burn mental energy doing that. Sustainable eating is going to reduce that cognitive load for you.

What it looks like is maybe having three to five go-to breakfasts that you just alternate or switch out on a weekly basis. Maybe it's the same for your lunches: you have three to four go-to lunches, and you're just alternating them, like I said a couple of episodes ago about being repetitive with your food. And I know some people are like, that's boring, I don't like it. But clearly what you're doing now is maybe causing you too much stress, and you need a simpler approach. Maybe you don't want to think about food. So this is just a strategy to try and implement to see if it works for you. And you don't have to keep eating the same things. Like I'm saying, switch things up. But just make sure you keep it consistent so that you're not putting so much mental stress on how and what you're going to eat.

Because nutrition is one of the hardest things, you guys. I was just talking to a friend over the weekend, and she was like, I'm falling short on my nutrition. I'm like, girl, everyone does. If we all had nutrition down 100%, we'd all be walking around with some rocking bodies right now. So give yourself grace in this category. But I'm telling you, if you implement this stuff, three to four go-to breakfasts, three to four go-to lunches, protein anchored at every meal, portions that you understand, meals that your family can eat too, flexibility built into it, that is a sustainable approach, at least to nail down the nutrition aspect and kick it off. And then you can start playing and adding recipes and different things, months into it, once you've developed some type of structure that you can lean on in the beginning.

It's not about thinking, oh, I need to eat clean versus not eating as bad. It's not like this food's bad and this food's good. No, it's more about: this strategy is effective versus this strategy I've been doing is kind of ineffective. Healthy doesn't mean it needs to be hard. And going back to the 'I need to eat clean versus not eat as bad' thing, I just want to point this out: you can still eat clean and still be under-eating protein, over-consuming calorie-dense foods, missing total intake targets and swinging wildly on the weekends, right?

Whenever somebody says, I try and eat clean, or I try and eat healthy, I'm always like, yo, can you unpack that for me? What does that actually mean for you? And they start listing off that they eat three meals a day. And I'm like, do you think that's enough for you? I've got people who are like, oh, I'm eating way too much food. And I'm like, let's actually look at what the data really says, what the numbers really say. Tell me again what you're eating. And we open up MyFitnessPal, we start logging the foods, and it's 350 calories each meal.

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That is just over a thousand calories in a day. So when you allow yourself to bring that type of awareness to the table: eating clean, eating healthy, as a side tangent here, you can still do all the things I just said. Under-eat, over-consume, miss targets, swing on weekends, et cetera. Sustainable eating aligns with your goals, right? And when it's consistent, it just becomes automatic. So you're not having to carry these mental loads of what am I going to eat, when am I going to eat it, I want to have all these recipes, X, Y and Z. If you can allow yourself that strategy I just described, interchanging some meals and getting protein in every meal, consistent will become automatic, and automatic will become sustainable.

And I'm literally saying all of this because that's exactly how I went about my journey. Because I was a bodybuilder, I ate the same meals. But eating the same meals taught me to be able to eyeball portions, and it also taught me to learn what is on my plate. This is a protein. This is a carb. This is a fat. And over time, eating the same meals for eight months straight while I was in prep, even longer because I would take it into my off season with some leniency, it allowed me to see, this is how much food I'm actually eating in a day. It's only 2,000 calories or something like that, right? So it allows you to paint a different perspective when you're consistent with something, and then it becomes automatic because you can just guess, or you become accustomed to the portions. And then that becomes sustainable, because you can learn how to plug and play.

Focusing on sustainability also prioritizes you continuing to get stronger and stronger, right? We've talked about nutrition. Now let's talk about training. It builds into you prioritizing strength. Why? Because you're focusing on building muscle. And it's not that you need to jump on the next six-week workout program. Okay, and if you do, that's awesome. But having somebody to hold you accountable in the strength category, like working with a coach, someone who is able to see what weight you did this week, challenge you to increase your weight next week and ask you questions about how that weight felt. How did it really feel? Were you fatiguing? Were you getting to the point of fatigue or burnout or whatever? You're able to unpack that with someone, and that someone is going to actually push you harder.

A lot of women I hear try and work the same program for six months. If you don't change your workout program at least every four to six weeks, or sometimes you can push it into the six-to-eight-week category, your muscles are going to plateau. Your muscles are not going to feel like they're being challenged. In order to feel like you're being challenged, you need programs that are changing, right?

And you guys know how I feel about muscle, right? Muscle improves your insulin sensitivity. It naturally raises your resting metabolic rate. It supports your bone density, keeps you stronger, increases longevity and improves glucose disposal throughout your body. It enhances your hormone health and longevity. It just improves your aging trajectory. So think about it as metabolic armor. It's not just about being aesthetic. It's about building this metabolic gatekeeper, is how I look at it.

So going back to my point about those people doing the same training for six months, or doing a different workout every week: the way you look at sustainable training is that it has progressive overload in it. To my point about working with a coach, that's someone who actually challenges you to increase your weight on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on what progressive overload looks like for you. It includes rest, because there are so many women that just train seven days a week and they don't include a recovery day. Sustainable training, and not only sustainable training but having accountability, keeps you from being someone who just goes into the gym to punish themselves for eating too much with cardio or overtraining, right? If your training constantly leaves you feeling exhausted, inflamed, injured or burned out, that's not sustainable. So sustainability looks like progressive overload, recovery, rest, knowing when to push yourself and knowing when not to.

So one last thing before we start closing it off is mindset. This part matters. Having a sustainable mindset. Unsustainable journeys feel very chaotic. And maybe you can relate to that, because you have that mentality if you're in a program like the one I mentioned earlier in the podcast, where it's six weeks, it's all or nothing, you're cutting carbs, restrictive, yada, yada. We've all been there. In the midst of that, if you are saying, I blew it, or I'm starting over, or I'm going to need to restart on Monday, I'll fix it on Monday, this isn't working for me, I need something new, that is an unsustainable journey.

Sustainable journeys feel more calm. And I'm saying this because I'm literally living in this right now, and I've been living in it for years now. If I think back to my chaotic states of really not knowing what to do and being so confused, it's chaotic. It's like, I tried this program, but it's not working. I'm locked in and going to the gym, working out, but I can't get my nutrition down. So I blew it, so I need to start over on Monday. None of this is working for me, so I need to start over with something new. I've been there, done that. And I know you guys have as well.

Being on an actual sustainable journey, if you mess up on a meal, it's like, oh, that was just an off meal. It's all right. I'll get back to it tomorrow. One meal is not going to throw you off track. What I should say there is one meal is not going to ruin your progress. No, not at all. Instead you're like, okay, I'm just going to adjust. Or, I recognize that this is just my lifestyle. This is a long game, right? The tone is different. The feeling is different. It's less emotional. It's less reactive. It's more stable. And when you are living in that type of language, narrative and mindset, that stability is going to compound. So if you can build emotional stability around fitness and food, you'll remove 80 to 90% of the self-sabotage cycle.

But I'll tell you this: sustainable looks so boring. It is not as complicated as so many people think it needs to be. It literally just looks like walking, lifting, eating protein, drinking water, sleeping, repeat. Get my blood work checked. See if all my stuff is in alignment. That's it. It's not some fancy trend. It doesn't go viral. It doesn't look impressive on Instagram. But do that for 12, 24, 36 months, and it changes your entire physiology. The basics aren't just basic. They are the foundations of a successful, sustainable journey.

And sometimes when I say sustainability is boring, it's because when you are building the foundations, a lot of these basic things seem so minute and invisible while you're building them. You won't see it until it's been months or even years into your journey. You don't have to be restricted. It doesn't have to feel chaotic. You don't have to be on the next best trend. Those things are why so many people feel overwhelmed, confused, conflicted. What do I do? What do I need to eat? When do I need to train? That's what's causing the mass confusion in the fitness industry, when really this is all you need to do.

Okay. So zoom out. If you strength train three to four days a week, if you eat adequate protein, if you maintain a small deficit while you're going for fat loss, or if you reverse and retrain your body, if you sleep well, if you manage your stress, if you don't quit every three to six weeks, then in 12 months your body composition is going to change. Your metabolic rate will stabilize. Your insulin sensitivity will improve. Your hormones will regulate. Your confidence will rise. Your relationship with food will calm down. And most importantly, your identity is going to shift, because you are no longer going to be in this chaotic 'I need to try this diet, I need to lose the weight.' You're not going to be in that anymore. You're going to be in this sustainable feeling of calm.

But most people will never experience that. I will tell you that right now, because they will chase novelty. Sustainability requires you to be repetitive, and repetitive feels uncomfortable in a world addicted to new things, trying new things and the new shiny object on the market. Look at it as time, plus consistency, plus your physiology, plus your mental narrative on this. That is going to be a massive transformation.

So if your journey feels slower than you expected, or it's less dramatic than you hoped, or it's more repetitive than exciting, that means you're probably finally doing something right. Remember, sustainability isn't flashy. It's not trendy. It's not going to go viral. It's the foundations. It's powerful. You don't need something new. You need to stay exactly where you are, and you need to allow time, consistency and the narrative of your mind to change. And that's going to equal your transformation. That is how you win.

Guys, if this episode resonated with you, go send it to a friend that needs to hear it. Go share it with your aunt. Go share it with your daughter. Go share it with your coworker. Go share it with your best friend. Share it with somebody. All right? And then screenshot this episode and let me know what resonated the most with you. I would love to see that. Tag me on social media. All right, guys. Love you guys, and I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out.

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