Female Hormones and Body Composition
All this week I have been exploring how much to eat to support our training. By far, the most common question I get during our quarterly check-ins is, "How much should I eat?" Most of us have a goal to control our body composition so that we maximize our lean mass and keep our body fat percentage below a specific level.
Many, many of us have a weight loss goal. I understand and respect our desire to have a healthy weight. I also want to stress that it might be more important to track our lean mass rather than our body weight. Our body is amazing and the skin, muscle, bones, organs and body fat all play a vitally important role in our homeostasis. Lean mass influences our metabolism and body fat influences our endocrine system, aka hormones. This is why body fat percentages above 30% for men and women younger than 50 are a concern. Body fat is hormonally active and the more we have of it the more it impacts our insulin, cortisol, and other hormone regulation. Drop it below 30% and you reduce the risk of most metabolic diseases. Lean mass, notably, muscle, is metabolically active. The more we have the better we are able to stave off many diseases of aging (osteoporosis and sarcopenia, and to some extent diabetes and metabolic X syndrome.) You can ameliorate many of the health risks of high body weight by have more lean mass and lower body fat. That's why your body composition (lean mass and body fat) matter much more than your body weight. Remember, I can calculate your lean mass at your check-in or you can get it tested on campus. For us women, our hormones, during puberty, reproductive years, and the menopause transition can give us all kinds of challenges. This is especially true if we are athletes, which all of you at the gym are:) That's why I'm sharing this excellent and short podcast from Wild Health featuring Dr. Carla DiGirolamo the lead instructor of my Menopause continuing education course that I just finished. She provides an excellent synopsis of how our hormones impact body composition through all the phases of our hormonal journey. No matter where you are in your life, puberty, reproductive years, our menopause transition you will definitely learn something from Dr. DiGirolamo. Click on the link below to listen or go here. In this episode, Dr. Mike Stone and Dr. Carla DiGirolamo, board-certified Reproductive Endocrinologists who specialize in all aspects of fertility care, will be discussing a topic that is of utmost importance to many women - weight management and its relationship to female hormones.
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Optimum Energy AvailabilityYesterday I explored Low Energy Availability, LEA, a condition that impacts about 47% of female athletes in their 20s & 30s. It is an emerging concern amongst peri- and post-menopausal women (active women over 40) as there is increasing trend amongst our active aging population to not eat enough. Low energy availability can be particularly insidious among perimenopausal women because the signs, which include menstrual cycle disruption, brain fog, muscle loss, decreased bone density, increased risk of injuries, and/or not responding to training as you used to can be confused with some of the issues that can arise during the menopause transition. Men are not exempt! As I explored yesterday, active men can slip into LEA when their optimal energy falls below 25 kcal/kg of lean mass. For us active women, our threshold is higher at 30 kcal/kg of lean mass. Yesterday I shared how to calculate your ideal calories to prevent LEA. Today we'll explore how to tell if your current nutrition program can support your training load and prevent LEA. Remember we need to know our lean mass (also called fat free mass or FFM) in kilograms (kg.) Today we'll also use our wearable tech such as Whoop, Garmin, FitBit, Oura or Apple watch to determine our active calories. Here's a visual of where we're headed. To determine if your current nutrition program supports your training program you first need to track your food. You can use the Macros tracker in BTWB or other apps like My Fitness Pal, Carbon and others. Once you have tracked your food for about 7 days you'll have enough data to get a solid average of the calories you eat. Second, we need to calculate how many calories we burn during our training session. Your wearable tech will give you a pretty good estimate. None of our fitness trackers are 100% accurate, and that's ok. We're looking for trends. Go back through a typical week and add up all the calories you burn during exercise and divide by 7. Now we're going to use the calories you eat, the calories you burn and your fat free mass to see if you're in LEA. Remember, one day of LEA is fine, but CHRONIC LEA is what we want to avoid. Our bodies are resilient and can bounce back. But, I'd rather not see you go there in the first place. Here is our equation. Let's do the math! As an example I'll use my data from January when I thought I needed to be on dietary cut but was feeling SO DAMN TIRED and I just didn't want to train. (This is a HUGE red flag! Fatigue and lack of motivation to exercise are classic LEA symptoms). My daily caloric intake averaged 1745 kcals. My average daily exercise energy expenditure (using my Whoop and getting an average for the same week) was 300 kcals on training days. My fat free mass is 61 kg. Using our Optimal Energy Availability equation my daily average was 23.6. No wonder I was SO DAMN TIRED! Doing the math can be very helpful. However, I also want you to be very aware of how you FEEL. Your feelings are always true and can be signals that something is not quite right. My feelings of fatigue and lack of training motivation were the impetus for me to enroll in the Active Menopause continuing education course I just completed. Sometimes even the Coach needs a Coach:) We are athletes, we need to eat to support our training, and I'm here to help you. Diet culture is a million dollar business and not all recommendations are applicable to our active aging population. As I learned in my CE course: Women have been indoctrinated with the 1,200-calorie-a-day diet. It’s just part of the ocean of diet culture we all swim in. Countless articles, books, and diet platforms, including Noom, Weight Watchers, and even the NIH promote 1,200 to 1,500-calorie diets for women. That sets the stage for chronic LEA for active women. If you would like help determining your Macros, optimal energy, and anything else related to eating to support your training, please book a check-in with me.
Eat to Support Your TrainingA few weeks ago I blogged about how the Menopause transition is NOT the time for us to eat less and exercise more. Since then I've heard from a few of you about how do you determine how much to eat. First, aside from making us feel nourished and healthy, our food intake should fuel our daily activities. We need to eat enough that we can adapt to our training demands. We need to eat enough so that we have enough ENERGY to get us through our busy day, training session at the gym, and all of the other things we do throughout the day. So how do we determine how much to eat? First we start with taking some important, albeit, uncomfortable measurements. To know how much to eat we need to know how much lean mass we have. I can do that for you with excellent accuracy during our check-in. You can also go to MSU and measure you lean mass via the BODPOD. I mention these measurements can be uncomfortable. Not because the tests are uncomfortable but rather the results can be upsetting for some. In order to understand what our lean mass is we first have to measure our body fat percentage. That can be upsetting for some folks. However, we can't determine mathematically how much to eat without that vital statistic. Once we know our lean mass we can determine 2 important nutrition targets, our daily total calories which we will call Optimal Energy and the amount of protein we need. Knowing Optimal Energy is important because there is an increasing trend amongst the active aging population (that's all of us CrossFitters, women and men over 40) to not eat enough because we are trying to lose weight or are concerned about gaining weight. This is NOT the time to eat less and exercise more. It can lead to a dangerous condition called Low Energy Availability (LEA). According to the Menopause continuing education course I just finished from the smart scientists at Feisty Menopause: Active women are especially at risk for LEA because of high training loads and the traditional emphasis on being as lean as possible for many sports. If you have days, weeks or months when you feel like you just don't have enough energy to do ALL. THE. THINGS. and your performance in the gym decreases, you might just be in an LEA state. The menopause transition is an especially vulnerable time because as we are trying to ride the crazy waves of natural hormonal fluctuations we need to eat enough to continue to build muscle like its our job. Because my strong and powerful sisters, it is our JOB to build muscle in menopause. Low energy availability is a state we slip into after just a few days of not eating to support our optimal energy. Here's what I learned in my Menopause CE course: Clinical studies show that when you reach an EA less than 30 calories per kg of lean mass, your health starts deteriorating after just several days. Now that we know our optimal energy ratio is 30 for women and 25 for men (i'm looking out for you guys, too:) we can determine how many calories we need each day. We do this by multiplying our optimal energy ratio and our lean mass (in KG) to get the calories we need to eat each day just to survive.
For example, my lean mass is 135lbs. To convert that to KG, I divide by 2.2 to get 61KG. Now I multiple that by 30 to get 1840 calories. That is the minimum calories I need every day just to keep my body operating. This number 1840 is pretty darn close to the number of calories I need based on my BODPOD test. It calculated 1921 calories on a SEDENTARY day. On active days I should eat more. I mentioned that our lean mass is important for a second nutrition target. It is the minimum protein we need daily to maintain our current lean mass. In other words, I should eat at a minimum 135g of protein to prevent any loss of bone and muscle. If I'm trying to increase my bone density and lean mass (muscle) I need to eat more protein to support my training. How much more? We will cover that in another blog. Do you need help determining your optimal energy? Book a check-in with me and we can will calculate it together. Myth: Food cravings are our body's way of telling us that we need certain nutrients.On Friday I wrote about how to tell the difference between hunger and cravings. Today I'm going a bit deeper into cravings, specifically the falsehood that it's our body's way of telling us we need certain nutrients. If today's myth were true, you would crave peas, tuna, oysters, spinach, and Swiss cheese since these foods are high in zinc, omega 3 fatty acids and Vitamin D. These three micronutrients are the most commonly inadequate in our diet. Cravings for pizza, ice cream, chips, chocolate, fries, bacon, cheeseburgers are all learned behaviors. Before we dive into today's myth let's first use some common language. Cravings are a state of heightened eating motivation that is directed at a specific food. Hunger is a nonspecific motivation for calorie-containing food in general. It's important not to interchange the two. If you're really hungry, you'll be willing to eat fish and steamed broccoli. If you're not, you're most likely craving something based upon a learned response to it. Cravings follow a predictable pattern of cue, routine, reward. Our brains are hard-wired for specific physiological and psychological needs such as water, social support, physical comfort, sex, and of course, food. When we successfully acquire one of those things our brain releases dopamine. Dopamine is an incredibly powerful feel-good biochemical that we instantly want more of. We form an association, a cue, that the thing we just ate, drank, touched, or had sex with is what makes us feel so good. Of course, we don't know that we feel so good because of the dopamine release. We just want more of the thing. Every time we get it we get more dopamine which reinforces the thing and thus our routine is created. Let's explore a real world craving example of pizza. In the very primal part of our brain, pizza is an outstanding source of calories from delicious fat, carbs and perhaps protein. As you eat it your brain releases dopamine and also catalogs all of the smells, sights, and tastes of the pizza. The association becomes so strong that all you need now is a reminder of the pizza and you'll start salivating and craving it. You experience this when you see a pizza commercial on TV or when someone suggests going out to Bridger Brewery after Friday night's workout. You start salivating and obsessing about pizza. This is because the last time you ate it your brain released one of the most addictive chemicals on earth into your blood stream. Here's an illustration of how this works from the smart folks at Examine.com. Since we're all unique snowflakes some of us crave salty things and some of us crave sweet things. But none of us crave healthy things. That's because cravings are a hold-over from ancient times when highly-palatable high caloric food wasn't available 24 hours of the day. Back when we had to hunt, gather and travel for miles and miles just to get something calorically dense our brains rewarded us. It motivated us to find that amazing food source again. Now, all we have to do is call and it will be delivered to our front door!
Chocolate and sugar cravings are even more interesting because of the addition of another highly addictive biochemical called theobromine. Theobromine is a stimulant that accentuates fat and sugar’s natural ability to spike dopamine signaling. That's why sugar cravings are the hardest to control. Some research suggests that sugar is the most addictive drug on the planet, more so than crack, cocaine, meth and heroine. Good luck controlling that craving! Since cravings are driven by sensory cues (sight and smell) the most straightforward way to control cravings is to avoid exposing yourself to those cues. If temptation is not around you can more easily avoid it. Clear out your freezer, fridge and pantry and "it's out of sight out of mind." In the meantime, the next time you see a social media post about how cravings are our body's way of telling us that we need certain nutrients you can confidently call "bullshit." There's a LOT of silly bullshit on social media and I want you help you identify it. Do you have a myth you want me to explore? Tell me in the comments. |
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