5: “How Much Should I Eat To Lose Weight?" | ASK DR. ANNA

How much should you actually eat to lose weight? In this episode of ASK DR. ANNA, Dr. Anna breaks down one of the most common mistakes she sees over and over again — and the answer might genuinely surprise you.

Most people think the less they eat, the faster they'll lose. It feels logical. But for many people over 50, eating too little is the exact reason the scale has stopped moving.

Dr. Anna breaks the myth that “less is better” and shows how chronic under-eating slows metabolism, drains energy, and triggers rebounds. She walks through a real patient case study of someone who started losing again by eating more, and gives a practical formula for eating in a way that makes fat loss steady and sustainable — without starving yourself.

Listen in to learn:

• Why eating too little slows your metabolism and backfires over time
• What your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is and why it matters more than you think
• A real case study of raising calories to restart progress
• Realistic calorie ranges for women and men over 50
• Why crash diets are so dangerous
• How muscle drives metabolism — and how to protect it
• The Perfect Meal Formula Dr. Anna swears by
• Why processed diet foods often work against you
• How to control blood sugar, reduce cravings, and actually feel full
• How the Mediterranean Diet makes all of this sustainable long term

Drop your questions in the comments below — Dr. Anna may answer yours in a future episode!

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Transcript

Why Eating Too Little Backfires;

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I get this question from viewers a lot. Dr. Anna, how much should I eat to lose weight? And because this is such a common question, we're gonna break it down today once and for all. Maybe you've heard all kinds of things, like you need to eat an extremely low number of calories. Maybe you've just heard, just eat less, move more, you'll be fine, you'll lose weight that way. Or you've heard things like you just need to listen to your body. And you might not know which of these things is actually right for you. And it's kind of confusing. While there is no one size fits all number that works for every single person, I have to tell you, there's good news. We have some guidelines that actually do work for most people. And here is what is crazy. Most people don't actually know this. If you eat too little, you might even make weight loss harder for yourself, not easier. The goal is not to just eat the minimum. Because if you do not understand how much you should be eating to sustain a good, healthy rate of weight loss, you might be starving yourself and want to just quit or quit entirely, or you might end up eating too much and then you're wondering why nothing's working because the scale isn't moving. So not only does the amount matter, but what you're eating really matters too, actually, even more, I'd argue. And I'm going to explain why later on in this video. Hey, I'm Dr. Anna. Welcome to my series here where I'm answering real questions I get from viewers like you. These are just honest conversations about weight loss, real life, and no BS. Yes, I'm a medical doctor, but this conversation is not medical advice. This is really just my personal take on all these topics being a medical doctor. And I have to warn you, I am going to tell you my actual honest opinion on things. So you've been forewarned, but seriously, just keep in mind your personal situation is unique. And if you're wondering about personal health questions, I cannot encourage you enough to just talk to your own doctor or healthcare provider about it. But I do hope that this conversation and all of these conversations helps you think about what might work for you just to make weight loss easier. That's the goal. So

Patient Story: Low Calories, Big Problems;

SPEAKER_00 2:10

let's dive right in. The biggest mistake that I see. People who I work with personally in my clinical practice, people I talk to online, I see this all over the place. People are eating way too little, thinking that it's gonna speed up the weight loss process. Now, we have to talk about this harsh truth, maybe, or this nice truth, because honestly, most people want to be eating a little bit more than they are. When eating too little backfires, here's what you gotta understand. So to break this down, I'm gonna tell you a story. A woman came to me in my clinical practice a while ago. Uh, she was kind of in a classic situation, exhausted, very irritable, very, very, very frustrated because she wasn't losing weight and she was putting in so much effort. She already had worked with her dietitian for some years and she had been sort of off and on with it. She was following all the protocols that people were giving her exactly with her dietitian. She had a gym trainer, she was doing everything everybody was saying. And initially, it definitely worked for her, but she started getting stuck. And overall, she still wasn't seeing the results she really wanted. She just wasn't losing as much weight as she wanted to. So I was meeting her for the first time. I said, okay, let's kind of go back to the drawing board, walk me through a typical day. Tell me what she ate yesterday, for example. So this is what she told me. Typical breakfast, black coffee, no sugar, no creamer, nothing. And she would sometimes have like a protein bar or a granola bar, but she was buying these low calorie ones. So they were always ballpark 150 to 250 calories. And of course, black coffee provides no calories at all. So then her lunch would be often some kind of a salad, a bowl. She would usually get like a pretty good quality, high amount of protein in there, some chicken, maybe just some tomatoes on top, and very low amount of dressing. Sometimes she told me she would just put vinegar on her salad. So when we kind of did the math, her lunches were somewhere in the ballpark of three to four hundred calories. Then what was she eating for dinner? She was very regimented. She was always having a vegetable, sometimes would have a starch, and would have, again, a high quality source of protein. Usually this was some kind of a fish that she would bake in the oven, or it would be something that she defrosted from frozen. She had some soups left over, but overall her dinner was tight. It was also usually less than 500 calories. So we did the math, and she was not snacking at all. She was said she drank so much water and she would buy a lot of those electrolyte packets and flavor up her water and then added no calories. So in total, she was eating about 900 to 1,000, maybe 1100 calories for the whole day. And she was doing this for months. And like I said, she had lost weight when she first started doing this. Like you would guess for somebody eating such a low amount of calories. And she was also exercising. But then being at a doctor's appointment, we were also talking doctor stuff, medical things. She had some symptoms. She was feeling cold all the time. She was really exhausted. She wondered if it was her thyroid. She felt really scared because her hair started falling out. What was going on? So, in this scenario, I was seeing her in my office. Luckily, because I'm a doctor, we could check some of her lab work and see what was going on under the surface. Here's kind of what we learned in summary. I told her what her numbers were showing us was telling us a message. Her body needed a certain amount just to function, like all of our bodies do. We actually burn a lot of calories from doing normal being alive things. Breathing, keeping our heart beating, having our brain juices flowing, having our digestive process going, even just thinking itself, moving our bodies is a whole other story. So just being alive takes a lot of calories. The problem with diets that are highly restrictive, like what this patient of mine was doing, was it was cutting

Conservation Mode And Metabolism 101;

SPEAKER_00 6:10

down so low that her body was going into what I described to her as conservation mode. What is conservation mode? So this is not a technical term. This is just an easy way to think about it. Our body has a certain amount of energy it needs to have in order to function to stay alive. And the way we get that energy is from eating calories. So all the process of energy moving through our body is something we call metabolism. So if we're not getting enough calories to meet our basic metabolism, our metabolism adjusts and it slows down. And so what can happen is that because we're consistently not eating enough calories, like this patient of mine really wasn't for what she needed, her metabolism did slow down. And often what happens in this situation is people can lose water weight, they can lose muscle, what we call lean tissue, instead of being able to burn fat. And ultimately that whole process makes people feel kind of awful. It's not really sustainable, is the point. And so she was exhausted, and of course she was, because her body was really struggling. It was trying to conserve energy because it didn't have enough. Eventually, this ends up leading people to quit and binge eat, and then weight regain can happen. And so once I had a couple of appointments with her, we started unpacking this that okay, not every day was actually a thousand calories. There was some binging behavior that was kind of coming through, which honestly wouldn't surprise me because it's not sustainable what she was doing. So let's talk about this in a little bit more detail so you can understand. The body, as I mentioned, has a baseline need. The technical term for this is our basal metabolic rate or BMR. We do not need to get too obsessive about memorizing any numbers, but think about it like this what you'd burn just laying in your bed all day long doing nothing, and also what you burn during your sleep is kind of helping us understand what our basal metabolic rate is. And so this is a ballpark, everybody's technically different, but for most women, this ranges in about 1200 to 1500 calories in a day. And for most men, it's anywhere from 1500 to 1800 calories in a day. That is the amount of energy that your body needs just to function, just to be alive. So that means you should on average be eating about that much just to stay alive. Now, if you're eating below that, two things can happen. So, first of all, if you're doing this initially, absolutely, if you are eating fewer calories than your BMR, you're obviously in a calorie deficit. So you will definitely lose weight, like guaranteed, by definition. The other thing that can happen is that if you do this long term, there can be some problems. Your body will start to adjust to that new rate. And so the example that I told you before about my patient, that's kind of what happened. Her metabolism was slowing down and things were getting affected. And it will potentially lead to some body functions not performing optimally. And this is where people can get symptoms. Now, of course, is it technically true that you do not need this many calories every single day? Of course, our body is actually structured to be able to do what's called feasting and fasting. Because historically, when we were animals in the wild and we had to hunt and gather our food, well, you didn't always know when your next meal was coming. So by no means am I saying this is the amount of calories you need to function every day for staying alive. You can absolutely stay alive, but the idea is your body's still expending energy. And so this is literally why our biology has set it up for us to have a mechanism to hold on to extra energy for later. That is what acquiring fat is. The whole process of gaining fat is for our body to hold on to extra energy for quote unquote tomorrow, because we don't know if we're gonna get to eat tomorrow. That's how the biology is set up. But of course, in our modern day, we have food all around us all the time. Most of us are not in a situation where we don't know when our next meal is coming. And so we end up just having fat for no real benefit.

Muscle Loss, Aging, And Sarcopenia;

SPEAKER_00 10:20

And this is kind of a its own discussion. So we're not gonna go down that rabbit hole. Let's go back to the focus. So the possible issues that can happen if you're under-eating for your basal metabolic rate and you're eating every day, your hormones, things like your thyroid hormones, for example, will start to adjust. They can slow down. Your body can start also breaking down other tissues for energy. So, like I mentioned, we absolutely will take fat from our stored fat tissue, or what are technically called our adipose cells, and we burn that up and use it for energy. That's the whole process of burning fat. But unfortunately, the body doesn't only burn fat for energy, it absolutely will start to break down other types of tissue in the body, namely lean tissue like muscle. It will use this for energy. And this is where we get into the danger zone. This is the kicker. Muscle is the organ of our body that helps us burn calories in the first place. So if you're destroying the very vehicle or the very machinery of your body that helps you lose weight and burn fat, well, this is particularly dangerous for you. And it's actually counterproductive to you wanting to burn fat, because the last thing you want to do is get rid of the organ of your body that helps you burn the fat, right? That's just kind of logical. And so what I always like to convey to patients or anybody that I'm talking to, especially folks online here, like yourselves, it is extra dangerous if you're already in the age bracket where you're considered like older adults, any honestly, I consider anybody like after midlife, because these people, especially women after menopause, are already at risk of losing more muscle. There are some hormone changes that happen during menopause that are going to make it even harder for you to hold on to muscle after you go through menopause. And so you really need to pay attention to this. When we're under-eating, if all of this stuff goes wrong, then we are losing muscle, especially in older age. We actually have a term for this, medically speaking. It's its own diagnosis, quote unquote. It's called sarcopenia. And so this is not a good thing to have. You do not want to be losing a lot of muscle, especially when you're older. So if you're eating too little for too long, I see this happen a lot in patients, the body will adapt. It's actually going to get even more efficient at handling the lower calorie intake that you're giving your body. And so, what's that going to lead to is a little bit less optimal functioning, or you're not going to feel as good. In other words, the problem is if you bounce back and you stop doing such a restrictive diet and you start eating kind of a more normal amount of calories, predictably, you tend to gain weight even faster because your body gets out of that conservation mode and it thinks, oh good, this is what I wanted. Let me store the fat for later because I don't know when I'm going to eat again. Again, go back to that biology, the thing we were saying. Our body has pre-programmed ability inside itself to gain fat because it doesn't know when the next time it's going to get a meal. So you have to think of this process from the way your body is thinking about it. This is actually a lot of you might be realizing this right now. You take the same logic and you can clearly see why crash dieting almost always backfires. You're basically like shrinking the amount of calories you're taking in when you're crash dieting. You're forcing this process of stress on your body, under eating, under your basal metabolic rate. And then when you increase your calories, you regain a lot of fat pretty fast and it stinks. And it's like the most frustrating thing when people are dieting and they end up yo-yoing. It has a really negative consequence in the long term. So the concept here that I want you guys to understand is that you do need to eat

Crash Diets, Plateaus, And Yo-Yo Weight;

SPEAKER_00 14:05

enough calories to actually keep the metabolism, the metabolic rate high enough so that we're eating enough for all the function of our body. We maintain our muscle mass, which helps us keep the energy up to burn enough fat. It's actually a really ironic thing. People think they just need to shrink their calories to the minimum because it's calories in, calories out, but there's more concept to it than that. So the goal is actually finding the right calorie deficit that will still allow you to lose fat tissue and not just the maximum deficit that you can sustain so that you're able to just stay alive. So at this point, you've kind of heard me ramble about yes, eating too little doesn't really work. There's consequences, right? There's consequences on the body, it goes a little bit against our biology, it's not sustainable. And then we risk that yo-yo effect of regaining even more fat if we stop doing it. So you might be wondering, well, Dr. Adda, what is the right amount? I want to understand how much do I need to really lose weight? So if you get your number wrong, you might either gain weight or you'll stay stuck. That's the problem. So let's now address this part. This is where I usually start with people I work with. I pick a number that works for most people. And I told you some general calorie numbers in a day, the ranges for people's typical BMR or their basal metabolic rate. So, with that frame of mind, I'll tell you about a different patient encounter I had. This is somebody I'd worked with. Um, she was female. She had also been eating very few calories. I think for her, she was somewhere at the ballpark of a thousand calories a day. She was literally miserable. And we quickly just bumped her calories up. I said, You are under-eating. I know that this is gonna sound shocking, but I actually want you to eat about 1,600 calories a day. And this was a hard adjustment for her because it was something that she had convinced herself that a certain number of calories were dangerous for her body. So she was super terrified that she'd gain a lot of weight. And of course, this can happen. But we approached it in a smart way. We didn't just have any calories, we had the right ones. So the first week, her weight didn't really change much. The second week, um, she started to notice she gained a pound and she was upset. But I told her, stick with me because this is kind of anticipated. We are replenishing your metabolism and this is a process. So then by the third week, she finally lost a pound. So she had gained one, lost one, so she basically was back at zero. And then by the end of the first month, she noticed something completely different. Her energy like turned a corner. And finally, she said, I haven't felt this way in years. And I thought, now we're talking. That's her metabolism kind of coming back. So she had more energy, and thus she was able to start properly exercising again and feeling less stuck. So the time horizon needed to be stretched out. A few months after that, now we were in a place where she was able to start burning the fat. She started changing up her exercise routine. We incorporated a bit more balance in terms of her exercise. Weight training is something she hadn't done. We incorporated that in. I really wanted her to preserve her muscle mass. So, long story short, zoom forward six months after that, and she had started to lose a good amount of weight. I think we were at about 22 pounds that she had lost. She was thrilled, of course. But I had to have her trust the process in order for her to get to that point. If she had quit after those first four weeks, well, what do you think? She would have basically lost just nothing almost. Remember, week one, weight didn't change.

How Much To Eat: Realistic Ranges;

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Week two, gained a pound. Week three, lost a pound. I honestly would argue none of that is even real weight change. That's all just body fluctuation. And it wasn't until the fourth week where we started seeing some action. And so this is why if you're somebody who's going through this, just consider give yourself enough time to let that metabolism readjust because it is a process. So most women, remember, in general, you might need to be in the ballpark of anywhere from 14 to 1800 calories a day. It depends on so many factors, though. I'm not saying this is true for everyone. This is just average stuff. Depends on your height, your age, your activity level, etc. Men end up falling somewhere in the ballpark of about 1800 to 2200 calories a day, right? The only reason I'm wasting your time even telling you numbers, because I know some of you are craving, pun intended, a specific number. Some of you love numbers. So I'm just giving you these ranges, but I don't even really want you to worry about these numbers. Overall, the game is always the same. You gotta create a calorie deficit without putting your body into a state where you're dropping your metabolic rate, meaning where you're starving yourself and living off less energy. You need enough energy to do all the functioning to keep your body alive, but also enough to sustain good amounts of exercise. And that requires calories. Also to be able to just feel good and enjoy your life. The game is not to starve yourself just for weight loss. You want to be able to lose weight in a healthy way, but live your life. It ideally should be a process and a regimen where you can sustain this for months. Remember my patient that I just told you about. She didn't really see results until month number two. And that was key because it's what allowed her to get to six months later, where she lost the 22 pounds and then kept it off, and she kept the weight loss going. She lost a lot more weight after that. But the point is she needed to trust the process. And so this is the kicker that I see most people getting confused about. You have to think about it like this. You do want to actually eat the most amount of calories you can to sustain your energy while still maintaining a calorie deficit so that it's sustainable, so you can do this for the long term. Not just the lowest amount of calories you can survive on, because there are consequences to that. The more you can eat and still lose, the more room you actually have to adjust later when maybe you hit a plateau. So think about it. If you were starting from a place of only eating a thousand calories a day and then you plateaued, where do you go from there? 800, 600? That is not healthy. And so I get concerned when I see people trying to just minimize the amount of calories down to nothing, they're really starving themselves and it's it's consequential. Plus, don't forget, at those low calorie intake levels, you are risking not, you're not losing fat, you're losing muscle tissue, you're you're losing lean tissue. The number on the scale might budge, but it might not be from the thing you want. So keep that in mind. If you start instead at like 17 or 1800 calories a day of a deficit, and then you kind of are losing weight, but you you plateau, you get stuck. Well, you have a lot of wiggle room. You can have some days where you're eating just 14 or 1500. You can change it up, but you want to give yourself that wiggle room. So eating more means another thing really important. You can include foods you actually enjoy. And that means maintaining your lifestyle, going out to restaurants, having social meals, going to dinners, and not worrying about having dessert because you have plenty of wiggle room. You can live your life. That is what this is about. We should not have to sacrifice our lives just for the sake of losing weight. That is ridiculous. So it's about building a way of eating that you can maintain for months and years, not just get to your goal weight fastest, quit that diet, and then regain all the weight in the few months after. That's what most people end up doing, but you're here because you want a different approach. Now, here's something important these numbers are all just starting points. Like I said, everybody's technically a little bit different and in a different situation. Your actual needs depend on a lot of factors. I know I said this.

Refeeding Case: From 1000 To 1600;

SPEAKER_00 22:00

But I want to make it really clear. It matters your age, your current weight, of course, your height, like your the shape of your body, how active you are, and not just are you active or not, which kinds of activities are you doing? How much muscle mass do you have? Are you engaging your muscles and your hormones? And of course, being on certain medications can also affect your weight and your ability to lose weight. So this is why there's not a one size fits all to this stuff. So for example, let's just run through some scenarios. A 55-year-old female who is 5'2 maybe needs a different amount of calories to get into a weight loss mode than a 35-year-old woman who is 5'8. That's just so obvious, right? When we put it that way, they're at different places in their life trajectory. Maybe the 55-year-old woman probably already went through menopause. That 35-year-old woman certainly has not. And then they are two different heights. So their body is going to have a different ideal body weight just from that. And because of that, and maybe they have different activity levels, they're going to need different numbers of calories in their day, right? But for most people just trying to lose weight, somewhere in that 1400, 1800 for females, again, 1800 to 2200 calories a day for males, this is a good ballpark. And it's a good place to start if you're not working with someone one-on-one and you just need a good starting place to go from. You could experiment with anything in these ranges. They're usually good ballparks for most folks. Now, there's another aspect to this. If you are losing more than, let's say, two pounds a week consistently, there is something to be said about the type of weight that you're actually losing. It's possible that you are not just losing fat, but you are also losing lean tissue. So that is losing muscle, losing water weight, et cetera. Now, the goal for most of you, I think, it should be to burn the fat specifically, not the other tissues of your body. That is not the goal. That's why we need to think about this smarter. If you're not losing anything after a month, you might need to just adjust your starting point. And that's okay. Again, it is really hard to know your exact metabolism number unless you do a lot of extensive testing, which I'd argue for getting weight loss results is literally not even necessary. Most clinics don't even offer that stuff. And so you don't have to worry about it. You just have to pick a number, start experimenting. You can always change things up. It is best to start with eating enough food so that you have that wiggle room. Remember, like we talked about, so that if you get stuck, you can adjust. Now, you might be thinking, okay, Dr. Ada, that was sort of a lot. Um, let's say I picked my calorie number. Great. Here's the thing: are all calories the same? You might be wondering this. And the short answer is absolutely not. Because if you're eating the wrong foods, even at the right calorie level, you might still be miserable, you'll quit, or you risk not getting any results at all. Or you may lose weight, but again, you're not necessarily helping your health. You might even be harming your health. And this is actually the most important part of all. And the part that I see lost on so many folks, it is a shame because the goal is to get healthier. Losing weight is not just for aesthetics, it's not just for looks. It's actually to help your body out, to decrease your risk of a lot of diseases, to feel better in your body is for health, ideally. So we do not want to lose weight at the expense of our health. So think about it like this: you can eat 1500 calories a day of junk food and be starving all day long and have horrible symptoms and cramps and bloating and fatigue and itchiness and joint pain and whatever. Or you can have 1500 calories of really healthy, balanced meals and feel completely different and satisfied and sleep amazing and not have all those symptoms. So this is where the part of the conversation gets a little bit smarter. We're talking about quality over quantity. I'll tell you this story. This is an example that I see all the time, but I had a client once who was tracking really well and she was hitting her 1500 calories, and she was measuring everything, and she was absolutely losing weight. So it was working for her. She found her number, she was like feeling really positive about this. But then we talked about a little bit more what was going on in her body, some of her symptoms. And then I asked her, okay, I need to actually see what you're eating. So I know you're tracking your calories, but let's try to write it all out, bring

Sustainable Deficits And Wiggle Room;

SPEAKER_00 26:40

it in. I want to see the food diary so we can talk about it. So it was a lot of typical American foods, let's say protein bars, diet foods, low-fat everything, a lot of processed food, trying to just minimize the calories overall, which technically was working, but it was sort of at the expense of eating high-quality food. So when it came to it, she did honestly tell me she was hungry all the time, but she just got used to it. And it sort of became an obsession of how many calories she was eating. And this is sort of the danger of tracking calories for too long. It can get in people's heads a little bit. So I had her change things up. We came up with a plan that kept the calories the same so she wouldn't lose some of her progress. But we decided to just go full Monty into a whole foods approach. We had Greek yogurt, berries, nuts for breakfast. Her lunches were lots of grain bowls and salad bowls, and she would make her own dressing instead of those low-fat or even fat-free dressing packets that have tons of added sugar. We had her have some nuts and a little bit of dark chocolate for snacks, things to keep her energy up in the day that were just really healthful, solid sources of calories, and her actual dinner that she would enjoy. Tried to cut out all of the packaged and processed things as much as possible. Again, we kept the calories the same. But fast forward, and she was a really committed person, so this worked well for her. Of course, I wasn't surprised, she felt completely different after the experience. She got rid of all that food noise and all that obsession, and she sort of got into a rhythm with it, and it was honestly amazing to see. Well, what was really going on here? It's something that I teach all the time, but breaking down what she was experiencing was the following. Because she was eating a lot of whole foods, she was maintaining the right amount of nutrition in her body. Protein was adequate. It was keeping her full for hours. She was finally eating enough fiber. Fiber is a part of food that has nothing to do with calories. It's more just about the bulkiness of plant foods that keeps us full. And it keeps us full longer and it slows down our digestive process. So, this is what we get from vegetables and fruits and whole grains, nuts and seeds. Lots of things that she enjoyed, beans as well, give an amazing amount of fiber. And then switched up the types of fats she had. She was very afraid of fat, so she was eating a lot of low fat everything. But I told her we can calculate the amount of fat you need in your day, but from healthy sources. I had her eat, again, lots of nuts, almonds, pistachios. Those were things she liked to snack on. Really healthy sources. Of course, olive oil is in there. When we start eating the right foods, like this person I worked with, they are game-changing for us. The quality of the diet is incredible. And it is the thing that allows people to really sustain this stuff for the long term because it gets us full after we eat, which overall helps us maintain our calories across the day. We tend to not risk overeating and we don't have to walk around being as hungry, but we do have to get the food right. It doesn't happen if you're not willing to eat the healthy foods. So ultimately, what was really cool is that for the first time, this particular person that I was telling you about, she was able to experiment and actually stop tracking entirely. And when she did that, she was still maintaining her weight off. It's not like when she stopped tracking, she regained

Personal Factors That Change Your Number;

SPEAKER_00 30:10

it because she had learned the fundamentals. It was so cool to see. So, yes, the number matters, but what you're eating matters way, way, way more. And what I'm talking about is that quality aspect of the food. Quality and quantity combined are like a powerhouse dynamo combination, it always beats quantity alone every single time. When we consider the quality of our food, that is where we can get game-changing results. So putting it this way sounds really obvious. For example, 200 calories of candy and 200 calories of salmon with some vegetables. Well, what would you guess? Is the body going to react the same way? 100% not. Of course, it's the same number of calories we're talking about, but we get totally different effects. Candy, for example, is going to super spike our blood sugar immediately. It's just a super quick source of sugar that is all from added and processed sugar. That often leads us to have that blood sugar spike and then it crashes back down an hour later. It will leave us feeling even hungrier, craving more sugar, drive us crazy, give us all that food noise. And sometimes that even stimulates more hunger hormones. And so we end up overeating when we eat a lot of those kinds of foods. Plus, we know that there's other consequences of added sugar. Some people get lots of headaches, fatigue, brain fog, and um, it also puts us at risk of some diseases. Instead, real food, like salmon with vegetables, is going to keep our blood sugar so much more stable. We got tons of healthy fat in the salmon. We have an amazing amount of protein. We have excellent fiber from the vegetables. This is the stuff that's going to keep you full for hours after your meal. So, of course, a meal is usually not 200 calories. That was just an example. But let's say you had a proper meal and it was healthy foods, you're giving your body actual nutrients that it needs to do its job. And this is key for weight loss. So, this is why I teach this very simple framework that I call the perfect meal formula. And it's like we talked about protein. This is pretty much the most central component of every meal. We want a ballpark for a lot of folks. This is going to be anywhere from 25 to 35 grams of protein per meal. So, high quality sources are ideal. It helps keep us full, it helps us preserve our muscle mass, which remember is the organ of our body that's actually allowing us to burn the fat in the first place. It's the thing that controls our metabolism. So the number is not necessarily black and white for everybody. You gotta understand your calculations, and there are ways to calculate your protein requirements, but a lot of people are underdoing it with this. I see this all the time. They're not eating enough high-quality protein sources in their diet. The second component of the perfect meal formula is fiber. Fiber we talked about comes from the plant foods. It's that bulkiness. Most people are really undereating fiber, especially in the United States. The statistics are terrible. And so the ballpark a lot of people

Are All Calories Equal? Not Really;

SPEAKER_00 33:10

want to aim for for this is a similar number, but instead of 25 to 35 grams per meal, like the protein, this is 25 to maybe 30 grams across the whole day. And so, again, whole form vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, which are beans and lentils, nuts and seeds. This is the stuff that keeps your gut bacteria thriving. This is actually fiber, it is the food for the bacteria. And so we care a lot about the bacteria in our gut because there's a lot of implications for our health overall. It affects our hormones, it affects our brain, our neurotransmitters, it affects our immune system. So many other things. It's honestly such a cool area of science. But what else is in the perfect meal formula? Healthy fats. So these three components: protein, fiber, healthy fats from things like olive oil, avocado, nuts, seeds, fatty fish, you name it, this is all the stuff that's going to keep us full after a meal. It's key for our overall body function, our digestive process, etc. All of that's gonna help you set up weight loss that's sustainable so that we can really maintain it in the long term. That's the goal. We do not want to just crash and burn. Now, if you build your meals around these three things, sometimes you don't even really need to count calories and you're still doing the weight loss really well. If you are able to do this, your body is going to naturally start to regulate itself because your hunger and your fullness signals will start to regulate, your hormones start to regulate, a lot of things will go well for you. So I cannot encourage this enough. This is as opposed to eating just a bunch of processed junk food, low-fat versions of everything, artificial sugar, zero calorie, everything. That is not the same thing for your body. So, yes, it's possible to lose weight eating that way, but it is not something that I would encourage anybody to do because there are consequences on the other side. Again, we want to support our health. We want this to be sustainable long term. All that processed and packaged stuff, I really question how good it is for us. I really do. I know that there's technically no research evidence that, for example, these zero calorie sweeteners are specifically harmful, but that's debated. And I would always support people eating a whole foods diet over anything packaged every single time. You'll never convince me otherwise. That just doesn't make any sense. Our body was meant to eat real food from nature. So let's say you hit your calorie target, but you're still hungry and you're still thinking about food. Well, then I encourage you to explore approaches like the Mediterranean diet. And this is why it works so well, because it allows us to get out of this restriction mindset, eat balanced meals, things that are delicious, things that are traditional. And I teach this stuff inside my Healthy After 50 Academy. We do not make people count calories in the group. You can do that. Of course, it's optional, and you'll probably get to your weight loss goals faster. But we teach how to build these satisfying meals for sustained weight loss, and it ends up being a lot of fun. The one thing I hear from most people inside my academy are wow, Dr. Anna, all that food noise went away. It's crazy. And that's kind of predictable

Whole Foods Swap And Satiety;

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because we're regulating your hormones. We're regulating your signalers. People lose weight without feeling like they're on a diet. And to me, that is the ticket to success because technically the Mediterranean diet's not a diet at all. Take-home message here, guys: the quality of your food should be central to what you're thinking about with weight loss. The number is something we can play with. Fix the food first. Okay. So I want to hear more of your questions. This was kind of a long one, but it's hard for me to explain some of the nuances to this conversation without digging into it. So thanks for sticking with me till the end here. But now it's your opportunity to drop your questions in the comment section below so I can make more videos answering what you want to know. And when you're ready, jump into the whole series up here. I have so many more videos where I'm answering your specific questions about weight loss, and I do not hold anything back. I'll see you over there.