The Tea with Tina
The Tea with Tina is going to be your new favorite weekly chit-chat that will feel like a good, juicy sit-down with your BFF. This podcast isn't your average (and boring) radio talk show-styled podcast. We dig deep, get personal, and have lots of fun along the way. Hear some relatable stories and a different perspective on various topics from health and fitness to pop culture. I am Tina Wieland, a certified fitness trainer and nutrition coach. Grab your caffeinated drink of choice, get comfortable, and be ready to hear the TEA.
The Tea with Tina
236 | 5 Common Weight Loss and Fitness Myths--DEBUNKED!
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Unlock the truth behind weight loss and fitness myths that have been holding you back! Join us on Tea with Tina as we challenge the outdated notion that eating less automatically leads to shedding pounds. Instead, discover how prioritizing nutrient-dense foods can keep you energized and cravings at bay. We'll also tackle the misleading belief that carbohydrates should be avoided, especially for women over 40, and reveal why a balanced diet emphasizing whole foods is your best ally. Navigate the maze of social media health advice with us, learning how to become a conscious consumer and align with credible, lifestyle-friendly sources.
Shift your perspective on fitness as we spotlight the crucial role of recovery and realistic workout strategies tailored for busy professionals and parents. Unlike elite athletes with extensive support systems, we offer practical fitness routines that fit into your hectic life. Explore the benefits of three to five exercise days a week, incorporating both total and active rest days to prevent burnout and encourage sustained movement. Embrace mindful eating by understanding the nutritional value and source of your calories, avoiding the trap of overindulgence in processed foods. Join our refreshing conversation to cultivate sustainable fitness habits and a mindful approach to nutrition that fits seamlessly into your lifestyle.
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Welcome to the Tea with Tina, your favorite podcast, where we talk all things health, fitness, lifestyle and maybe a little bit of tea gets spilled.
Speaker 2:We chat all about this in a super casual environment, so grab your beverage of choice, sit back, relax and enjoy relax and enjoy.
Speaker 2:Hey friends, welcome back to the Tea with Tina podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be talking about five common myths around weight loss and we're going to be debunking those myths. Okay, there is a lot of information floating around on social media. Anybody can literally pick up a camera including myself and film themselves and give you information, and there's really truly no way to fact check it. You kind of just have to be your own researcher, right? You can find information in your favor for pretty much both ends of the spectrum, for any topic. You know, meat is bad, meat is good, fruit is bad, fruit is good, cardio is bad, cardio is good. You can find it all right, and it comes down to, as always, being a conscious consumer, a conscious learner. You know, do your research.
Speaker 2:Every time I see an article and I question it and I go. That's kind of a bold statement. I usually click on the article and read through it and 99.9% of the time the title was blown out of proportion to be clickbait. This happens with hooks in social media as well. They do it to grab your attention because more views, more interaction, that's all good for them. And it's not true. You know, when you read the article, it explains things a little bit more and then you get the real issue and the real like tea on what it actually is right. I mean, it's usually something normal and not something crazy blown out of proportion, and I know that can get exhausting to do all the time.
Speaker 2:My advice to you would be do a little bit of a social media detox and go through and see are the people you're following actually trusted people? You know? Do they educate themselves? I mean, at the bare minimum, have, you know, a training certification? Right? There are some people out there that have PhDs or masters or even bachelors in exercise science, that are coaches as well. Do they tend to put out science based content, you know? Do they refer to studies? You know, and if it's somebody who you're following, that doesn't necessarily align with who you are like. If you're a 40-year-old mom with three kids, you don't want to follow a 20-year-old single lives-at-home-with-their-parents influencer because their lifestyle is totally different from yours. You know you're going to have that unrealistic expectation constantly in your feed and it's better to surround yourself with people who lift you up, who make you feel good about yourself, who don't make you feel negative and set realistic expectations for you. So all things to keep in mind, all right.
Speaker 2:So, with that being said, let's dive into the five myths about weight loss debunked, all right. So myth number one you have to eat less to lose weight. So this is a common belief, but the truth is it's not just about quantity, it's about the quality of the food you're consuming. So, instead of drastically cutting calories, focus on nutrient dense foods and fuel your body and keep yourself satisfied. This is so true because I've seen it before and I've said it before is sometimes you could be eating the proper amount of calories that your body needs, right Around the proper amount.
Speaker 2:But if it's all processed foods which processed foods aren't bad, they're just not a good bang for your buck. Choice right. They usually have nutrients stripped from them and then artificially put back in, you know. So they lack certain things like fiber and essential vitamins and things that you'll get from whole foods, like whole grains, fruits, lean meats, vegetables, healthy fats, all those things. But the more processed it is, you know you get something from a box or you get a protein bar. You know you're eating these quick, grab-and-go manufactured things. They tend to have very little protein, super high carbs and fat. They might have a ton of salt in them as well, and again, this is going to cause your nutrient ratios to be out of whack.
Speaker 2:When we have way too many carbs, way too many fat, that's going to cause us to hold on to water. We tend to gain weight easier. We don't stay full as long, which makes us more prone to cravings. So oftentimes, adding things into our diet that exists already maybe adding a serving of fruit with our lunch, adding some veggies to our omelet, you know, adding in things, maybe a healthy fat that can actually cause us to change our diet in a way where, like, wow, I'm actually starting to feel full, and then we want less of the stuff that doesn't serve us, the more processed things, and we try to get more of the good things in. So it's a weird mind thing, because I feel like it's been drilled into our brains for so long To eat less. Just cut what you're eating and in a way, yes, you need to be in a calorie deficit to lose weight, but sometimes it's all about eating the right foods, because we also want to stay satisfied, keep our energy high. We don't want to be cutting on Oreos or something like that.
Speaker 2:Alright, so that is number one Myth. Number two Carbs are the enemy. This is a big one for my girls that I would say are 40 and up. Maybe some of you younger people also fell victim to this. This trend might be coming back around. I'm not sure I haven't seen it yet. I've seen the low be coming back around. I'm not sure I haven't seen it yet. I've seen the low fat coming back in. That was an early thousands trend. We got the Pilates princesses, which no shame to Pilates, but it's just funny to see trends go through Pilates for long and lean muscles. We have the fat free. The heroin chic body is in the writing on the butt of the sweatpants, the juicy couture it's all coming back around. Even victoria's secret is going back to its early thousands roots. Very interesting to observe. Um, but yeah, carbs being the enemy. I see this a lot and here's the. Here's the reason why people think carbs are the enemy.
Speaker 2:Going back to the processed foods, most of your junk foods quote unquote junk foods have a ton of carbs in them. There are good carbs I don't want to say good and bad carbs. There's complex and simple carbs. Right, our simple carbs are the ones that can be digested really quickly and those are essential in certain situations. Right, we need a quick energy burst, like maybe before your workout if you haven't eaten anything. You some quick digesting carbs to give you that nice burst which turn into sugars which give you energy, is good, right, but most of us are sitting at a computer desk all day, um, munching on trail mix because we're like, oh well, healthy people eat trail mix, they're hikers and it's just all granola and M&Ms and you're like, wow, this tastes so good and it's so healthy for me. And guess what? It's straight carbs. You want to know why straight carbs and hikers use it? Because these guys are walking for miles and miles and hours. And what do you need when you're doing all that activity? Carbs Because it gives you energy, because you're burning so much. Not, not so much for those of you sitting at your computer desk, because when you eat that proposed healthy, uh, trail mix or granola, um, it's gonna get stored as fat because you're not using it. So that's another thing too that's important to note.
Speaker 2:You'll, you may see a lot of athletes. I know, I see this a lot, especially with, like, high school and college athletes. Um, you know, they're training two plus hours a day, usually when they're really like working for the season right, with practice and actual games and things like that, whatever the sport is and you'll see them like fuel up after with like a burger and fries and you're like, wow, they get to eat whatever they want. They do because their body burns it up right. That's when there's no bad like you almost want that quick burst of fats and salts and carbs because your body was depleted of all that. If we look at somebody who just has, you know, an everyday lifestyle and they're not very active, they're probably getting less than 5,000 steps a day. They're sitting most of the day. You know they need much less food and they're not burning it up and hence it gets stored as fat and that's one of the reasons that carbs gets a bad rep.
Speaker 2:You know a lot of those processed foods have carbs. Now there are, you know, the more complex carbs which are slower to digest. They have more fiber in them and nutrients, and that's where the whole grains come in right, like an Ezekiel bread is a sprouted grain versus your bleached white loaf of bread which, like again, was stripped of nutrients and they put nutrients back in. Um, you know fruits, veggies, those are all good carbs. Uh, your starchy carbs. Your starchy carbs like sweet potato, potato, all of that pasta, even rice, okay, all more. Well, I would think. Pasta, I think, is a simple carb. But the protein pasta I swear by as a great nutrient because when it's packed with a little bit of extra protein it's fantastic. But yes, you want to more, so go for the complex carbs. And again, if you're active and you need that little burst, or in small doses, simple carbs are not the enemy. But ice cream, potato chips, cookies, cakes they all have carbs, but again, they're the simple carbs, right.
Speaker 2:Another reason that carbs get a bad rep is people think that it makes them gain weight instantly.
Speaker 2:But what really happens when you eat carbs is it brings water storage to your muscles, but also you can just hold on to water in general with carbs, right, and that water retention can give you the appearance that you're puffier, that you're bloated, that you gain weight, but it's just water weight.
Speaker 2:And this is why bodybuilders and such will eat like candy right before their show when they were on a super low carb diet, because once their body gets those carbs, the water flows into their body, puffs up their muscles, gives them a nice little pump to go on the stage, gives them a fuller look, so they use it to their advantage, right? So yeah, carbs can be a little complex, but I'm always somebody who likes to know the why behind things and not be like oh well, every time I eat carbs I just get fat and it's like, well, that's not exactly right, right it's just because maybe the higher calorie, more processed, less nutrient dense foods tend to have higher carbs in them, the more simple carbs, and we don't burn them off, um, and they make our bodies hold on to water, right?
Speaker 2:that's, that's truly the answer. I know it's the the more boring answer. You're like, oh, okay, uh, but it's true, all right. Something else that I think is worth noting is that carbs are actually really important for our body because they are our body's main source of energy, right, because it is more of a quick converting energy. Fat takes a little bit longer to convert function. You may see that stat floating around where I think it's 125. It's either 125 or 135. Don't fact check me, but I know it's somewhere around there.
Speaker 2:Grams of carbs per day to function properly and I was actually when I was studying for my yoga certification this morning, they said that our brain actually uses 25% of our calories every day. Right, so that makes sense as to where the carbs come from. Right, we need that energy to function and carry out our daily processes, and when you'll notice if you've ever been on a low carb diet with an exception to people who maybe are, you know, pre-diabetic, diabetic, insulin resistant, things like that, where they need to maybe cut back on their carbs. You know, just an average person. No underlying issues. If you restrict carbs, you feel foggy, you feel really foggy. You know you might get cold and weak and your brain doesn't work properly and that's from lack of carbs. So carbs are important, but remember we got to pick the right ones. Okay, so that's number two, number three of five. Myth number three you need to exercise every day to lose weight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, while regular physical activity is crucial, rest days are just as important. Your body needs time to recover, rebuild and adapt. Overtraining can lead to burnout and injuries, so be sure to include rest in your routine. Yes, and this is the thing with overtraining. I will state this, and I learned this a long time ago it's not that our bodies can't handle working out like crazy. Right, you can work out six days a week, seven days a week. You need to counteract it, though, with that much rest and recovery. If you're not supplementing with the level of recovery versus the amount of activity you're putting out, you're going to crash and burn. So it's not to stretch. So if you can't sit down for three minutes to stretch, what makes you think that you have a solid recovery routine. Right, we're trying to train like an athlete, but we're not recovering like an athlete.
Speaker 2:And I always like to resort back to athletes because they're really great role models for the extreme end of the spectrum. They're really great role models for the extreme end of this the spectrum. Again, if you look at Olympic athletes I've said this many, many times they work out hard, but they have a full recovery team behind them. Think about it. They probably have a nutritionist or meal prep service, or they're getting their meals cooked for them and they know how much nutrients they should be getting and they're getting that served to them, right? Maybe they have ice baths or saunas or a massage therapist or an athletic trainer that's stretching them, checking them for injuries. You know, you'll see, even just like watching football and things you'll see them on the field before a game. They might, you know, have an ice pack around their leg or, again, their trainer is stretching them to warm them up.
Speaker 2:You know, when you're training that intensely, you need to recover for injury prevention and to make sure your body recovers properly. So keep that in mind, which is why, again, I'm talking to lifestyle people. Right, that's who I teach, because I truly believe there's a lot of you out there that the fitness world is just so saturated with athletes and people who look pretty and like they do this for a living. So they're going to be training like an athlete, which is fine, and I think that's wonderful. But you, who is like a busy mom or you're working crazy hours and you're just trying to look a little bit better, you're trying to act like them, but your lifestyle doesn't fit it. Right, like so what does I'm trying to bring lifestyle fitness out into the mainstream, right, like? What would it look like if we moved our bodies in a realistic way? For people who work 40 hours a week and people who have kids and people who have fur babies and are busy and maybe don't want their life to revolve around fitness, but they still want to make fitness an important part of their lives? Right, and that's where you know instead of training six days a week, seven days a week, can we train?
Speaker 2:My most successful clients tend to be between three to five days a week. Now, if you can only do one or two, it's better than nothing and a good place to start, and my general recommendation is the more days you're training I don't want to say the less effort you should put into those days, but spread your energy out right, like if you only had three good days to work out and it was like Monday, wednesday, friday or Monday, thursday, sunday or something like that. You know, and it's spaced out, you're going to be able to put some more effort into those individual days because you have more time to recover. But if you're training five days a week, you know it's going to be less intensity, but you're still going to be showing up, putting in the reps, if that makes sense, because your body's probably going to be a little bit more sore, a little bit more depleted, so you're not going to have as much effort to put into those days. So keep that in mind.
Speaker 2:Now, with that being said, though, like I said before, one, at least one rest day, like total rest day, I recommend, and then one active rest day you can do where it's not a direct workout. You're more so doing maybe yoga, stretching, going for a walk, maybe yard work, cleaning your house, running around with your kids, you know, whatever it's, just you're active, but it's not an intentional mapped out workout, and that's also something that's important, you know, just because you can't do a crazy workout every day doesn't mean you shouldn't move your body every day. Right, parking farther away from the grocery store, getting your steps in doing stretches, taking a yoga class, standing up from your desk to do a couple squats, right, that movement versus exercise are two separate things. So we just don't want you going and doing a CrossFit workout if you've never done it before. Like six days a week with no recovery, all right, context is important. So that's myth number three. Myth number four Okay, we're at four out of five.
Speaker 2:We're almost there. All calories are created equal. Okay, so not all calories have the same nutritional value. For example, 100 calories of broccoli is very different from 100 calories of candy. Whole foods nourish your body better and provide essential vitamins and minerals. Focus on the source of your calories, and this is so true. You know. That kind of goes back to when we were talking about the carbs. Are the enemy? Right, it's. It's.
Speaker 2:If we're not aware, especially in this day and age, if we think back to the early 1900s, the 1800s, like before, I would probably argue, before World War II, right, like a lot changed post-World War II, especially in America, with like progression and uh, tv dinners got introduced, plastic was introduced, so the way things were made and processed changed greatly. Right before that we were more so focusing on like, like many people were very lean because they just were eating to survive. Right, they lived on farms, they yielded harvests, like in the winter time. If you, whatever you harvested, if it was a bad year, you know you had to rely on trade and hope that maybe somebody else had something. You're canning, you're preserving, you're hunting meat in the winter time. You know you were relying on the resources available to you, so we weren't necessarily eating for enjoyment, we were literally eating for survival and none of that stuff was processed right, it was meat, fruits and vegetables. You could probably make cheeses and maybe some other random things like jams and preserves, like very simple-unquote processed things, um, but that's all you got right. And then, and breads and things like that, but, um, as things got more processed and we were going more for convenience and and then it kind of turned into how can we save money, um, and still deliver the same product? So they might sneak in different preservatives or certain chemicals or pesticides get legalized and then you're allowed to use those in there.
Speaker 2:The quality of our food evolves also from farming. The quality of food evolves, you know, our soil nutrients actually gets depleted. It's very hard to restore nutrients back into the soil. I know they probably do it artificially and somewhat naturally, but it's hard to maintain that. So the you know carrots we grow today versus 100 years ago are different, like the 100 year ago carrots had way more nutrients than the ones we have today. Right, because we're just pumping them out. They may be genetically modified, all that stuff. I know that sounds all crazy but you got to put it into perspective.
Speaker 2:Nowadays I don't know the stats, but if you just walk around a grocery store, the amount of things that are processed, I remember I was actually taken aback. There was a woman who had like vegetables and fruit in her cart. She just set them in the cart with no like produce bags. I did purchase reusable produce bags because of her and she inspired me and I was like taken aback. I was like, oh my god, like to see somebody's cart that just had like fruits and vegetables. I can't remember if there was meat in there, but it just looked so natural but it looked so out of place Like. I was like, oh my god. She just set the onion in the cart like no bag, nothing, and I'm like, oh yeah, could do that, like why can't you do that? So she's inspired me to either use my reusable produce bags, because I have like little mesh bags, or just set things in the cart Because you can just wash them when you get home.
Speaker 2:They usually have an outer protective layer, like we don't need to. You know, waste plastic and things like that, but it's kind of crazy when you think about it. Plastic and things like that, but it's kind of crazy when you think about it. But my point was that if you look at what people buy and what's available in the grocery store, I would probably argue again this is just random stat off the top of my head. Probably like 70 to 80% of foods are processed in some way. They're going to be box. You know.
Speaker 2:You go down the center aisles there are Oreos, chips, canned soups. You know everything's pre-packaged, going through some processing phase, and obviously there's some benefits to this is the fact that they have a longer shelf life. They might be more convenient, right? You don't have to prep as much, you just whip it in and heat it up. Now I will say in modern, you know, in recent years. I think things have gotten better in the aspect of the healthy realm is starting to pick up a little bit and there are healthier options. Things like, you know, microwavable rice. It's not going to be bad. They simplify it for you. There may be some processed ingredients in there, but it's better than getting a bag of potato chips. Frozen vegetables usually a better quality Frozen fruit because they're flash frozen at peak freshness nowadays.
Speaker 2:But you just have to be mindful and you really have to think. Because if you just mindlessly kind of grab stuff because I've done this before somebody who tracks my food my point is is, if you mindlessly grab stuff, it is so, so, so easy to consume hundreds, if not thousands, of calories when maybe you should only be eating like 500 for a meal, and then it goes over a thousand. Um, you know dressing here. You know, throw in some peanut butter here, have a big serving size of this here. Then you add a bag of chips like so easy. Look at when you go out to eat, right, try to get a three-course meal and add all that up and uh, you're, you're.
Speaker 2:Macronutrients are out of proportion. You're going to be way under on protein, way over on carbs, way over on fat. It's just, you have to be mindful and you have to be aware of what's in your food, because it's really tricky nowadays and it sucks, um. But yeah, that's just why I am a firm believer in calorie and macro tracking, because it tells you and makes you aware of exactly what is in your food. Okay, so we have that. That's why all calories are definitely not created equal. So we have that. That's why all calories are definitely not created equal. All right, and then the last myth weight loss is linear. This is a big, big, big mindset shift.
Speaker 2:Many people expect their weight to drop steadily week after week, but that is not how it works. Your weight can fluctuate for various reasons, including water retention and hormonal changes, especially if you're a female. Focus on overall trends rather than daily fluctuations. I'm pretty sure I've made whole podcast episodes about this. Um, my new podcast website, there is a search bar or wherever you listen, there's a search bar. Usually, uh, try to search up like the scale, uh, weight loss, and you'll probably find more than one podcast episode about it. But yeah, the scale does not always go straight down.
Speaker 2:Fat loss and weight loss are more complicated than just losing straight weight. Now, if you have an extreme diet, maybe you'll see a more steadily drop, but I know for a fact that that's not going to last very long and you're going to end up caving and going back and gaining a ton of weight because it was unsustainable, right. But if we're looking at regular weight loss, where you're losing about a half a pound to two pounds per week the first week or two that you start a new diet, if you see a big drop in weight anywhere from seven to ten plus pounds, usually more. If you have more to lose that's water weight. Okay, some of that might be fat, not a lot of it, maybe one or two pounds, but you're losing water weight, not anything to bat an eye at, right. Losing the water weight's the first step before you start losing the fat, right. But we see that big jump and I feel like it hypes us up and we're like, wow, I lost seven pounds in one week. Imagine what I'm gonna lose in three weeks. But I'm going to lose in three weeks, but no, it slows down after this and that's why daily weigh-ins are important.
Speaker 2:Averaging your weigh-ins, you know, looking at other things other than the scale, like you know how strong we're getting. How are my clothes fitting? Taking measurements, taking progress pictures, because a lot of the times the scale might not be moving or even go up. But we're seeing good changes, positive changes other places. But we would never know that if we didn't track those other methods right.
Speaker 2:And, like I had mentioned before, there's other reasons that the scale could fluctuate. If it's your menstrual cycle, if you ate a lot of sodium and you're holding on to water you had carbs going back to the carb thing and maybe you're holding on to water. If you drank alcohol, maybe you're bloated and you didn't get a bowel movement. Maybe your hormones are simply fluctuating, maybe you're stressed out. So there's a lot of reasons. But in general, over a longer period of time not days, more so weeks and months we should see a trend downwards right, a trend.
Speaker 2:If it's not trending downwards, we're staying the same or going up then we need to look at things. Something's not right. You're either eating too much, you're not moving enough, you know recovery's off, something is off. And that's the kind of stuff that I do with my clients. I mean, if we don't track the data, how are we going to know? We're just, you know, guessing and we're like, well, nothing's happening, but we have nothing to reference it to. You're just like, well, it's not working, and we're like, but why is it not working? Right, you have to put on your scientist hat and really dig into why things aren't working, and you need to collect the data, because the data does not lie. All right, so weight loss is not linear. All right.
Speaker 2:So, to sum it up, myth number one you have to eat less to lose weight. That is wrong. Right, sometimes it's just changing the types of food you eat. Right, and it'll work itself out. Myth two carbs are the enemy. Definitely not. We love carbs, unless you specifically need a low carb diet or your body works better with low carbs. Uh, they are not evil.
Speaker 2:Myth three you need to exercise every day to lose weight. Definitely not daily movement. Movement is great, but you definitely don't need to do a crazy workout every day. Myth four all calories are created equal. Definitely definitely not. Like they said, 100 calories of broccoli and 100 calories of candy is going to look totally different. And then the last myth weight loss is linear. It looks more like a jump up and down, kind of like when you get your heart rate, your heartbeat, tested in the hospital. You know it's like beeping up and down, but you know, hopefully it trends downwards. So there you have it five myths about weight loss debunked. Remember that knowledge is powered. By understanding these myths, you can make better choices on your health journey. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who might need to hear it, and don't forget to subscribe for more tips and insights. Until next time, keep thriving. All right, guys. I'll catch you in the next one. Bye for now.
