So, you want to lose weight, but you have hormonal symptoms?
Maybe you’re struggling with hormonal weight gain or you want to lose weight for your blood markers or you’re tired of losing and re-gaining the same 10lbs.
Here’s the hard truth:
If you have very active hormonal symptoms, it’s going to be difficult to lose weight.
Meaning, those symptoms – whether it’s bloating, painful periods, low energy all day, but being wide awake at night – are a telling sign that weight loss might not be in your cards just yet and that you need to focus on reversing and managing your hormonal symptoms first.
But what if you decide to try to lose weight?
Plenty of people just want to lose weight. But if you go into a deficit without focusing on your hormonal symptoms first, you will fight tooth and nail to lose any weight at all.
Eventually you’ll plateau, then you’ll gain all the weight back, while your hormonal symptoms have gotten worse because they weren’t properly nourished.
The second hard truth is this:
Your body’s only job is to keep you alive. She doesn’t care that you want to lose weight.
In this article, I will break down how to lose weight and keep it off, while nourishing your hormones.
Guide to Dieting with Hormonal Symptoms
Step 1: Manage your hormonal symptoms
I recommend tracking your symptoms weekly. Take note of the symptoms (no matter how big or small they seem), rate how much they impact you.
It’s important to start getting curious about why you have these particular symptoms. Have you been underfueling your body? Overtraining with your workouts? Skimping on sleep? Are in a season of stress? Have you been trying to lose weight for too long? These all have impacts on your hormones.
When you acknowledge your symptoms and why they’re happening, you can start implementing changes to nourish your hormones.
Step 2: Eat at a maintenance calorie
While you’re implementing habits for your specific hormonal symptoms, make sure you are eating at your maintenance calorie.
When you eat at maintenance, you’re allowing your body to heal, feel nourished, and while making sure you get all of your vitamins, minerals, and nutrients that you need.
In a deficit, you’re naturally eating less and not getting as many of the nutrients your body needs, which can negatively affect your hormone health, aka give you new symptoms or worsened symptoms.
Note: even if you don’t have hormonal symptoms and want to lose weight, I encourage you to stay at your maintenance calories for 3 to 6 months (at the very least, if not more) to prime your body for a successful weight loss.
Want to learn what your maintenance calorie should be? Check out TDEE Calculator.
Step 3: Earning your deficit
As you sit at your maintenance calorie and your hormonal symptoms start reversing, know that you’re doing the hard part.
The easy part should be your actual deficit phase.
But if you skip steps 1 and 2, your deficit will feel hard, your symptoms will come back or worsen, and you will get back into a trend of unsuccessful (and yo-yo) dieting and weight loss.
As your coach, I recommend you take your time with steps 1 and 2. They are your way to earning your deficit, earning your results, keeping your results, all while making sure your symptoms don’t come back with a vengeance.
Deficit Checklist
So, you’re focusing on your maintenance calories and managing your hormonal symptoms.
There are a few more important things, outside of your maintenance calorie, that you need to be doing to earn your deficit.
You will have more success with your deficit when you have these building blocks in place:
- Get 7 to 9 hours of good sleep.
- Hydrate (Half your body weight in ounces of water per day!)
- Take a multivitamin to help you replenish the vitamins and minerals you’ll lack in a deficit
- Aim to walk and stand throughout the day
- Lift weights to maintain your muscle mass
- Manage your stress (stress can impact your results quickly!)
- Monitor hormonal symptoms – especially your sleep and your period, they don’t lie
- Make sure you are filling your plate with a variety of whole foods (no, it’s not always “if it fits your macros”)
- Keep an eye on your mental health and expectations – you cannot guarantee pounds lost, but you can control your habits that lead to weight loss
Step 4: Deficit metric tracking
Before you enter your deficit, after you’ve been at your maintenance calorie for several months and your hormonal symptoms are feeling managed, make sure you do any measurements and photos you want.
If the scale is not a trigger, I recommend weighing yourself a few times per week to see your average weight of the week. The number will fluctuate day to day, which is why multiple metrics are important to collect.
I also recommend taking your circumference measurements once a week, first thing in the morning.
And take your photos – if you are tracking with photos as well – once a week, in the same outfit, and with the same lighting if possible.
How you track your metrics is up to you, but I encourage you to track circumference or take photos because the scale won’t always show the entire picture of your progress, sometimes we lose inches and can see a physical difference before the scale starts budging.
Step 5: Calculating your deficit
Once you’ve taken your starting measurements, it’s time to start your deficit!
Because you’ve been at your maintenance calorie for a while by this step, you will be intimately aware of your maintenance calorie number.
Unlike most fad diets and trends, you’ve likely heard of (or even tried), the goal of our hormone healthy deficit is to eat as much as possible, while still losing weight. You should not eliminate certain foods or food groups – there are no bad foods. It’s all about the numbers here!
For your starting deficit number, I recommend lowering your goal calorie intake by 250 calories per day and stay there for several weeks.
For your macros, this will come from your carbs and fats, not your protein. Keeping your protein higher will help you maintain as much muscle mass as possible and keep you full longer.
Step 6: What’s next?
You’ll stay in a deficit for a little while, while tracking your progress as you go.
It’s important to note that the scale may not move right away – this is common for women – so don’t quit or think it’s not working. It will move soon!
Over the next three months, you can bring your calorie number down another 100 to 200 calories in your weight plateaus for 2 to 3 weeks. Again, taking these from mostly carbs and fats.
The most important thing is, you cannot and should not go below your basal metabolic rate (refer back to TDEE Calculator for this number). If you do, other systems in your body may start shutting down.
And if your hormonal symptoms come back while you’re in a deficit, it’s important that you pull out of your deficit and go back to maintenance. Remember, your hormonal symptoms will impact your results and your ability to keep them (long term and short term).
Step 7: After 3 months
After 3 months of being in a deficit, no matter how much weight you’ve lost or still want to lose, it’s important to return to your maintenance calorie.
This will ensure your hormones are still nourished and your body won’t experience a slower metabolism as she adjusts to the lower calorie intake (known as metabolic adaptation).
To avoid gaining the weight back, you will need to re-calculate your maintenance calorie. Then start adding calories back into your daily intake.
If your body starts gaining weight, know that it’s likely from the volume of food in your stomach. It takes 3,500 calories to gain 1lb. Using this method, you shouldn’t re-gain any weight long term.
Once you’ve returned to your maintenance, it’s important to let your body rest, recover, and feel nourished again. You should stay at maintenance for another 6 months (at least) before doing another deficit, if weight loss is the goal!
In Conclusion…
You don’t need to lose weight. You are complete how you are.
But, if you do have a goal for weight loss or physique changes, protecting your hormones is the key to losing weight, keeping it off, and still feeling amazing in your skin.
Do you want support with your hormonal symptoms and weight loss journey, let’s chat! Schedule a free Hormone Analysis Call today!
