Why You Can't Lose Fat Over 40 (It's Not a Fat Loss Problem)

00:00You 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. So 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.

00:35Hi, I eat over 2,500 calories in a day, sometimes 3,000. What's going on, everybody? Hey, you guys. Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkie Stott. And on these episodes, we talk about mindset and methodologies, tactics that will help you lose body fat, build muscle, be strong, and feel insanely confident. My friends, I got a good one for you today. I'm going to lean in on this one.

01:08I 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, like 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 Warrior Babe has helped over 100,000 women with getting them out of what they have been told and following the norms of the world in the fitness industry and getting them on a different path.

01:47And 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. Like I think about it like this, like two roads, right? And majority of the people are walking down this one fitness industry is telling them all these things. But like, I'm trying to grab as much women from this road and steer them on to this other road. And we've helped 100,000 women so far and that we are not stopping. And you guys know that I've competed in bodybuilding. I won three shows. I left undefeated, all natural.

02:19I've been polygraph tested the whole nine yards. I left a nursing career to build Warrior Babe because I saw how badly women were being served by the information available to them. And after all of that, you know, 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.

02:50So I want to talk about that and exactly what I mean by that in this episode. So let me paint the picture because I know, I know that some of you guys 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 wants, 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.

03:21And I say this because that was me over a decade ago. I wasn't eating enough. I didn't stop eating because I had a problem where I wasn't eating enough. And so I changed my eating habits away from sugary things and started focusing on more protein. But I wasn't still eating enough food. And then I, dude, if you guys know my story, I ran a half marathon or three half marathons within like the first half of the new year in 2015.

03:54Like, so like I say this because I know that if you find yourself in this description, I know because I was there too. I like talking like daily treadmill, like cycling classes, step counts, like burning as many calories as possible. This person probably eats less. She moves more in like the cardio sense. She stays away from heavy weights because she doesn't want to get too bulky. Literally saying, guys, I'm saying all of this because it was me. Maybe she does some like light toning work, like resistance bands and light dumbbells and like a Pilates class.

04:29You guys know how I feel about that from the previous episode that I just recorded around a Pilates class. She wants to change her body. She's waiting for her body to change. And when it, and it does, and it will for a little bit, like the scale will go down. She's going to lose a weight. She feels like it's working, but then it stops. Like the scale stalls. And then this is what happens with majority 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.

05:00She looks smaller, but she doesn't look like the way that she expected that she would look. No definition, not leaner, not no toe, just less of what she was before. So she cuts more, pushes more, restricts more. And her body at this point, which has been, which has now lost like significant muscle mass in this whole process. The body has lost muscle mass because it's, it's, it's going into it for energy reserves. It's tanked. It's metabolic rate.

05:30It's running on cortisol for months. And then it, the body just stops responding entirely. So this is not a you. This is just because of 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 and decades and over and over and over again. And it's still doing it because it's just repackaging things and putting it out things differently. But this is the predictable, inevitable outcome of an approach that was broken from the very beginning. Okay, you, you went after fat, you went after the building process, or you went after the

06:03fat loss process without building the thing that actually burns it. And so I need you guys to understand something that the diet industry has spent decades actively obscuring because if you understand it, you would stop buying their, 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'm a muscle mass, I'm burning calories, sitting at your desk, sleeping, watching TV, muscle is metabolically active, and it demands

06:38energy to maintain itself around the clock. Keynote, energy. It demands energy. Where do you guys think that the 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.

07:10Fat 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 the fat loss becomes and the easier it is to maintain once you get, like for me, it is, 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 like my body maintains itself just because of the lifestyle that I live, but also because the muscle mass that I have.

07:44The more calories that my body is burning from having more muscle mass on my body, and even if you guys just like, if you focus, you don't have to be as muscular as me if some of you guys think that it's too much, but in general, my point is you need to focus on building muscle. And 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.

08:14Fat storage at this point becomes easier. Fat loss now becomes harder. And a spiral of eating less and less and less and less to maintain the same result begins. This is exactly what chronic cardio and cardio restriction and calorie restriction without strength training produces. Weight loss, that is composed, like when you focus on what I just said, like where you go into doing more and more and more and how that person I explained a couple of minutes ago,

08:45you are losing weight, but it's also 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 1100 calories to maintain a weight that she used to maintain it at 1800 calories. This is why. Her metabolism, your metabolism didn't betray you. It didn't just stop working. You unknowingly dismantled it. Like one cardio session and one skip strength training session a day at a time is slowly

09:20bringing down this process over time because people do this for six months to a year or years, decades over time. And this is what boggles my mind. When people think that there are three months into a program and they're going to 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 main goal here, the truth that changes everything here, the goal is to not be smaller. The goal is to have less body fat. Yes. And more muscle.

09:50Those 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 a 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 to keep it off like permanently and sustainably.

10:23Like I said, with the two rows, like the women that are walking down the warrior babe way with the vitality and the lifestyle and sustainability without you living on this side of the restriction and the 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. Hi, I eat over 2,500 calories in a day, sometimes 3,000. And so isn't that what we all want to?

10:56Like 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, I didn't believe it was possible. Because eat more, you see obesity and you see all these things happening in the world, right? You tie some type of belief to it. And then when you start, but when you start taking the action and you start eating more, you start seeing the results. 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

11:27or every single workout. Like what I once did was 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 card your way into it. And so let me be direct here 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 before too also in previous podcasts, but I'll lean into it again. The fitness industry has known for decades that women are afraid of building muscle.

11:59I mean, geez, it's everybody's comment. It's like, I don't want to get too bulky. I don't want to like, I don't want, I'm afraid of getting too big. I'm afraid of looking too masculine. Afraid of the weight room. The lifting weights. And instead of educating women out of that fear, instead of giving them the truth about building muscle, 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,

12:30diet programs with no strength training component. Cardio only fitness classes. Marked as like, like how I said with what the Pilates studio that I went to, what they were marketing it as. Cardio fitness classes marketed as a path to you getting a lean body. You're doing these low load, high rep workouts that are sold to you as like toning and sculpting. And it's like this endless, like everybody, calories in, calories out. Like everything's about burning calories. Never about building the tissue that burns them automatically.

13:03The, the uncomfortable truth I'm trying to portray here about the diet fitness industry, like 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 and gains it back and does this whole yo-yo approach, she can't sustain the approach. And then she starts over. Guess what? She's what the industry loves.

13:33The revolving door of the diet industry is not a failure of the industry. It is literally the entire whole business model. You know how big the business model, the fitness industry is like it like billions of dollars. And women have been paying for it with their time, their money, their health, their confidence for, for decades, generations, dude. And you know, there's so many women that say worry baby is so expensive. I promise you that this will be the last program that you have to do.

14:05If you put in the effort to doing it, because we are about having our babes graduate programs and be able to leave feeling educated and understood. They get their body and they get nutrition and they get what builds muscle. Like I'm not willing to participate in this, this diet, this industry. I've never been willing to participate that. And that is why every single thing that we do at Warrior Babe is built on the exact opposite premise. Build the muscle first,

14:35fuel your body, understand the process, create the habits that are getting you these results, and then create results that last because that foundation now is set, solid, real, concrete, like, like, inbreakable. You guys can probably feel my energy through this, right? Like I'm hot on this stuff because like, I don't want to, I don't want worry baby to fall into the mix of the entire, weight loss and diet industry. I want it to stand apart.

15:06I want it to be different. I want it to be, and we are. We just, I want to grab more women and put them on this path, going this way. And like breaking down all your fears, your limiting beliefs, narratives in your mind, the things that you have been programmed to believe, which is not your fault over the years and the decades, squashing them. Like I joke around inside the Warrior Babe community, with the, you know, men in black, right? And the zap, and it, it zaps you,

15:37and it wipes your memory. It's a running joke inside the community. I want to do that to, to every single woman standing on this earth and get them walking down this other path. At the same time, to piggyback off of, there's this new movie out there. Total, total rant here. The Sheep Detectives. Remember when, um, Lily, the Sheep, if you guys have seen it, it's so good. I'm sure your kids would absolutely love it too. If you, if you've never seen it, highly recommend or grandkids. Um,

16:08the Sheep Lily, when something bad happens, or like, uncomfortable happens, or like, in this situation, the diet industry has gotten to their heads, she'll tell them, the other sheep in the herd, um, to forget. And I'll go, they'll count to three, and then they'll forget. So, I want to do that for majority women, and get them on the right path to understanding the things that they need to do. So, here, practically, right, talking about the approach, when it actually looks like,

16:39one would be, stop making cardio the centerpiece of everything. The second thing would be, start lifting, and actually lifting. Like, not resistance band, not these three pound dumbbells, not these performer springs, like, like, external load, dumbbells, barbells, cable machines, that challenge your muscles beyond what they can already do. Doing compound movement, squats, deadlifts, hit, rows, hip hinges, hip thrusts, presses, lunges, like, those, those exercises recruit the largest muscle groups, and they create the most significant training,

17:11training stimulus, and they produce the body composition changes that you actually want to see. And you got to do that, like, 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 got 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 got to make it fit on your calendar, and you got to make it a priority, because this stuff matters if you want to live a long life. And like,

17:42back to, back to the cardio, cardio is, 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 like the foundation of your fat loss strategy, then you're spending more time on the treadmill, then you are lifting weights, then you have the priorities backwards. Use cardio as your tool, right? Do it for like two or three sessions in 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,

18:14energy, fuel, nutrition. You cannot build what you cannot fuel. All right? So you have to give your body that protein. Without that, the training, training signal, like the, the muscle protein synthesis, like nothing is going to help fuel that, that, that process happening internally. That when women start adjusting, they start lifting and they start adjusting their protein,

18:44they see incredible results in a matter of like four to six weeks. So eat enough. More importantly, like 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. What you're, 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.

19:16And get off that scale. Ladies, get off that scale. Throw it away. Focus on non-scale victories. How much stronger you're getting. Your photo is changing. How you're feeling in your clothes. That number is not going to tell you the full story. And stop letting that single number tell you that, whether you are or are not succeeding. So what I want to leave with you guys here today is, weight loss is not the goal. Fat loss, which I've talked about the difference between the two. That is the goal, but that requires different strategies than weight loss.

19:49Body 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 guys have probably been like, yeah, I've lost weight, but I have no muscle definition to it. Yeah, because majority of things out there will get you there. You've been a smaller, smaller, fatter version of yourself. Skinny fat. This is everything I'm talking about here. The approach that most women are using, the restrict, do cardio, avoid heavy lifting, repeat. That does not produce the outcome that you want when it comes to a lean,

20:19toned body. It produces temporary weight loss, followed by your metabolism slowing down, followed by then you doing this loop over and over and over and over again. It's just a broken strategy. That's what it is. The right strategy is the one that has, that has always worked and will always work is that you build muscle and you feel it correctly and you let that fat loss happen. It's not the other way around. Build muscle first.

20:50And any limiting belief or feel that fear comes along with it, go check out Warrior Babe. Get yourself inside the community. Get yourself inside of 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 to be successful. All right? Love you guys. And I'll see you in the next episode. Peace out. Hey, really quick.

21:20Before 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 the 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.

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.