The Aerial Alchemist

Episode 29: The Leftovers

• Episode 29

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0:00 | 30:38

Intro & Announcements

2:52 — One of the phrases I live by

4:09 — What is TDEE and why does it matter

7:12 — Understanding hormones and menopause Dr. Mary Claire Haver

11:46 — BMI and its implications in healthcare

16:40 — The scale and body composition

17:30 — Gut health and dietary changes

21:23 — Check-in strategies for progress tracking

26:43 — Meal planning and prep tips

29:42 — Conclusion and future topics

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SPEAKER_00

Welcome to The Aerial Alchemist, where movement transforms into magic and stories take flight. I'm Fallon, dancer, aerialist, and storyteller, inviting you into a world where circus and dance meet creativity, resilience, and community. Whether you're here to be inspired, to learn, or to simply dream a little bigger, you found your place. I'm glad you're here. So I made notes and I'm gonna just throw those together today. Because I think that it's important to talk about these things, actually, um, so that we all are on the same page. And a lot of these things that I'm gonna get in today are more around the hormonal shifts and changes and other things that um I felt worked for me. And I think when we talk about those things, we're validated in our experience, people get educated, and then we begin to have a voice in the healthcare space, which is so important. So before we jump in today, just a reminder that Flourish is coming up, our retreat in Italy. Don't miss it. We're getting so close. Leah and I have been uh working on schedules and starting to plan the retreat content now that we have a pretty sizable group coming and uh we can get their feedback. Uh we would love for you to come and have your feedback too of what you want to learn. So we can we can tailor it specially for you. But it is going to be so good. Plenty of uh creation work, technique work, aerial work, but also a lot of rest and relaxation because what I have learned is that if you stay too busy and you do not allow space, you will not create. So we're definitely making sure that there's there's a cushy schedule and that it feels also like a retreat and not like a traincation. If you want a trincation, that is so good. I love that for you. This is not it. This is not it. This is a nice balance of of both, of both things. So anyways, I'll put the link in the show notes. As always, we hope to see you there. It's June 19th through the 25th. We are in standard pricing. If pricing is an issue for you for this or anything else that I produce, please reach out to P. I never want that to be a barrier. We will always work with people as much as we can. Let's get into it. So I don't remember if I said this in the last episode or if I just thought it and then went, you didn't say it. But anyways, one of the things that I live by is weight is lost in the kitchen and muscle is built in the gym. So if you are on a fitness journey of any sort and you are looking to gain or lose weight, could go either way. That happens in the kitchen and the muscle is built in the gym. So let's let's keep diving into that. And it's not as superficial as it sounds, I don't think. So it's something that helped me reframe my thinking around food. I think a lot of times we think about earning food. And I want to say, we do not earn our food. You eat food because you are human, so you get to have food. There is no earning food. And this goes back to like not putting like moral stigmas around food. There is no healthy or unhealthy food. There's just food. There's no good or bad in it. Some foods will help you achieve your goals if you have goals, and some will not. And that again, that goalpost, that goal is always changing, it's always moving. Every minute it's different. And you just have to kind of live with your body and listen to it and see what it needs the most in that moment. Something that I want to like just touch briefly on is our total daily energy expenditure or our TDEE. And that's the total calories burned in a 24-hour period. And that is comprised of four things: your BMR or RMR, your basal metabolic rate, or your resting metabolic rate. And that's the energy that's used for essential bodily functions, things like breathing, circulation, your heart breathing, breathing, cell production while you're at rest. And that is the biggest part of your daily calorie burn. You cannot change that. You can't change it. Hence, kitchen, not gym. Then you've got your non-exercise activity, thermogenesis, or your neat. And those are calories that you use to do non-exercise movements. So things like walketing, walk walketing, fidgeting, standing, doing your daily tasks, just generally like moving about your life. That you can change a little bit, right? You can get up and move more. You can park at the end of the parking lot instead of the closest spot that makes you walk more. You can fidget more. If you are neurospicy, that's something you're probably already doing. You can stand more. People get standing desks. So things like this can help change that a little bit. That comprises, let me see, I I looked up these numbers right before. So your BMR or RMR is about 60 to 70% of your TDEE, and your neat is about 15 to 25%. So still like a fair amount. Then you have the thermic effect of food. That is the energy used to digest, absorb, and metabolize your food. That's about 10% of your of your total TDEE. And fun fact, protein takes more energy to burn than anything else. So that is one way that you can change it. Your TEF is by increasing your protein intake because that will slightly bump that number up. And the last thing is your eat, which I don't like that exercise activity thermogenesis. So those calories burn through intentional, structured physical exercise, like running, weightlifting, doing aerial, dancing, those sort of things. So your exercise activity thermogenesis is about 5% of your total daily energy expenditure. Just 5%. So that's when I go back to weight is lost in the kitchen and muscle is built in the gym. You're not losing weight in the gym. I hear people all the time like, oh, I didn't, I didn't get my workout in, so I can't have that cookie. It's not like that's not what's gonna make or break you, is what I'm saying. And I also like the double part of it is that it doesn't mean the gym isn't important. It is for other reasons, but not necessarily if your goal is is weight loss or any of that. Like the gym doesn't really do much for that in a way, which we'll get into as we keep going. So the next thing that I want to touch on a little bit more that I didn't get to last week is hormones and how they factor in. And this is coming up a lot with me. I am in medically induced menopause, meaning they shut off my hormones and I went into menopause quite literally overnight within two weeks. I had every single menopause symptom there was. And there is no, there is no hormone replacement option for me. So I'm just raw dogging it over here in the in the menopause. And as I'm learning this, specifically with women or people in female bodies they that are going through this significant change, I'm learning more about like what the role of estrogen and progesterone have played in our lives. And there's a whole, there's a whole feminist aspect to this, which I'm not gonna get into today, but it just really, I was told my whole life that estrogen was bad and estrogen makes us crazy and we're crazy women, and you know, it's because of our hormones that we're like losing it. Estrogen was phenomenal. It was the lack of it that made me bonkers. So, anyways, I digress. So muscle drives metabolism. The more muscle you have, the more, the higher your TDE, TDEE is. It will, and your basal metabolic rate will be higher if you have more muscle mass. Menopause accelerates muscle loss. So we have to start like fighting this. If you're under-eating because you're trying to work out that that whole calories in, calories out thing, it worsens fatigue and then may have you not working out as much, therefore, losing more muscle mass, therefore decreasing your metabolism. It's kind of this like vicious cycle. And the things that protect your metabolic rate are protein and resistance training. I'm gonna put some links into people that I follow, that I read, their books, and stuff that is going to uh like back all this up in case you want to dive a little bit deeper too. But um, your BMR in all facets declines in menopause. So that TDD TDE is lower. Therefore, you can't eat as much if you want to maintain your weight, which stinks if you were a high volume girly like I am. I am hungry, I'm a hungry bitch, and I need a lot of food. There's a beautiful blue bird flying out my window. I'm leaving this in. This is my life. Uh, the other thing that so I I got a lot of this information from Dr. Mary Claire Haver, who is a who is a doctor who has specialized in menopause specifically. She has a new book coming out soon. Maybe, maybe it's already come out by the time I post this podcast. And she talks a lot about this on all of her things. So I highly recommend following her. She's got all of the research to back up everything she's saying, which I think is very important. The other thing that has come out about women and menopause, specifically when it comes to weight loss, if that is what you are wanting. I keep going back to that. Not everybody wants to lose weight. Some people want to gain weight, some people want to maintain it. Some people don't care and don't think about it. And all of that is valid and acceptable. So there. But fiber is shown to be the strength single strongest predictor of weight loss and menopause, not adherence to your diet, not anything else, but fiber. So I will get into just a couple of ways you could get fiber in. But next week, I'm going to be talking about my meal prep hack. And that will also include fiber, but you can just take a fiber supplement. There's a lot of them. Having been in GI for 12, 13 years at this point, every single doctor recommends Metamucle for everybody, for every patient, because most Americans are not getting enough fiber. So um tracking it, adding it up, knowing where you're at. I believe women should be around 25 grams of fiber. I'm gonna have to fact-check myself on that one. I don't know men because I'm not one and I have not paid attention. But you can Google it, what your daily intake of fiber should be. So um, a fiber supplement. The low carb wraps have a ton of fiber, like the low carb tortillas, tons of fiber in them. And then all of your fruits and veggies, so good for you. Beans. Beans have a ton of fiber. If it comes from the plant, it comes from the plants, it comes from the earth, it probably has a lot of fiber in it. Um, the other thing that I touched on last week so briefly was BMI and what that meant for me and like healthcare providers looking at my BMI. I want to be clear that there's a lot of controversy around BMI. And as there should be, I want to say that as a healthcare provider, that I do use BMI in my work. And I look at it as one piece of the puzzle. It's one number in a bigger picture. And I do believe that most of the people that I work with see it the same way. And why do we care? There's a lot of reasons in healthcare about why we care about BMI. Um, in a primary care setting, we're gonna be looking about if you have a higher BMI, then you are like more likely to have different health conditions that they're gonna want to watch out for. Heart disease is a big one, especially when we're looking at like visceral fat. There's different kinds of fat. I'm not gonna get into it. Feel free to look it up on your own. Feel free to reach out to me. Feel free to ask me for a whole episode on that, and I will do that. Um, but that's not fully what we're about here. So I'm gonna just leave it at that. There are different kinds of fat. Some make it make certain diagnoses more common for you and is more dangerous. And visceral fat is the one that we really don't like. It hangs out right around your organs. It's not necessarily the fat that you can see, and it can be more dangerous. So that's where they might be looking in a in a like primary health care, like your primary care office, some would be looking at that. What I do, we do um colonoscopies and endoscopies, which means anesthesia usually. Why do I care about BMI there? I care about it for a couple of different reasons. Typically, people with um a higher BMI, it may be harder to navigate around their colon because they have different tissues in the way, and it may be harder to give abdominal pressure if we need to do that. On the other side, people with a very low BMI could be very difficult to navigate their colon because they have the same length of colon squished in to a smaller space. And it could be more twisty and turny. So for me, when I see that, I think, hmm, this may be trickier to get through. We may need more medications to keep the patient comfortable. Does that necessarily mean that's what's gonna happen? No, it's just like a little like, hmm, I'm just gonna put this in my back pocket so that I can take the best care of this patient while they're in front of me. The other thing that we're looking for with like a deeper sedation and anesthesia scenario is if they have a higher BM, a lot of times there will be a lot of tissue, more tissue around the neck area. And if they have a short neck and a lot of tissue around there, then it's going to be harder to access their airway. So we may want to think about instead of doing a deep sedation, we want might want to do a full anesthesia and put a breathing tube in for them because their tissue may block their airway. Uh, and a lot of times this is like one number that we are looking at. Sometimes we're looking at the chart before they come in, we see the BMI, and it's just a flag for us, like, hmm, we might want to do this person in a different setting. And sometimes it will be an assessment by the medical team, either the anesthesia team or whatever, and it might be over the phone or it might be in person, we might make that decision. But it's all just kind of like, hmm, we're gonna just like note this. And then when we see the person, depending on how they carry their weight, that weight may not be up around their neck. It may be lower down or kind of dispersed throughout, whatever, for whatever reason, we may think, oh, that's actually like a totally fine airway. We're not concerned about that, and we keep going. And so all I want to say to all of that is because I get a little defensive about my healthcare community in a lot of scenarios when people are like, my doctor said that I was my BMI was too high and I was alright. All of it comes back to taking care of you. That is our goal. We want to keep you safe. And I really like me and the team that I work with, we truly are looking at it as one piece of the whole puzzle. And sometimes it's just like, oh, noted, that's there. And it's a way that we can give you the best care that we can give you. And it does not come from a place of judgment. It's just what it is. And I feel the same way when I'm teaching Ariel, this is just what it is. This is what your body is. And I there's no judgment. I just need to know the best way to help you do the thing. He I'm gonna be done with that for now. It's it's just, you know, one of my things. I think people don't understand where healthcare uh personnel are coming from when we're looking at those things and asking those questions. Along those lines, I alluded to the scale being just one number. Your BMI, the number on the scale, they're just pieces of the bigger puzzle. So um I had said that I had lost several dress sizes, but I had gained weight because muscle is heavier than fat. So if you're in a fitness journey, know that that is going to change. And I talked about like my check-in sheet and pictures and why those pictures were important. I'm gonna get more of that a little bit later in case you missed last week. But those pictures were important so that I, even though the scale wasn't moving, I could see the changes in my body composition and knew that I was still making progress, which for me was needed as a motivator to keep going, or I probably would have stopped if I wasn't seeing changes because who wouldn't have? And the and the last thing that I touched on last week that he didn't come back to, and this one was such a big deal. I said that I had been struggling with IBS before I started working with Shay. And after and during my IBS resolved, and I haven't had issues with IBS. And for me, having that high protein diet was the game changer in my body. I needed higher protein. I functioned better on higher protein, and my gut told me that literally. I had thought for years that it was like yogurt specifically that because that was like the biggest trigger when I had IBS, if I had any kind of yogurt, lactose-free or with the lactose, not was not great. There was a lot of times I would go out to eat and have like a really nice, fancy meal, and just be in the bathroom the next day all day and feeling horrible. And now that is not a thing anymore. I it's all but gone away. Every once in a while, I can tell I'm like, oh, I haven't gotten enough protein and I'm eating too much fat. So for me, like having too much fat, I'm not on a low-fat diet. I'm on a protein forward diet. I still have fat, just not as much. And I think what had happened was we're told a lot of I don't know that I want to say lies, but marketing untruths about food. And this came up actually with one one of my coworkers I was speaking with yesterday. We were told things like milk is gonna give you healthy, strong bones. It's not, doesn't do that. There's no studies that show that. That was paid for by the milk council because they were losing money. There's a lot of things like people are told that almonds and nuts are high in protein. They are not high in protein. They are high in fat. They have protein, that doesn't make them high in protein. It also doesn't make them bad, it makes them not what we were expecting we were eating. So I think over the years, I had thought that I was getting enough protein, but I actually wasn't. And that's when reading those labels truly matters, especially now. And I'm just gonna say this because it's really a thing. Like a whole lot of people are on a protein-focused protein for diet, and as such, the marketing is coming out on all these different food products of like high protein food. I need you to flip that over. I need you to read the ingredients, I need you to read the nutrition label and decide for yourself if it's actually high in protein. And what is considered high in protein is like 10% grams versus the calories. So if I have a hundred calorie in a serving size, it should be 10 grams of protein or more to be considered high protein. If it is a hundred calories and it is two grams of protein, yes, it has protein in it, but it is not high in protein. So yeah, all that to say protein is happy in my body. I enjoy it beyond like just aesthetically speaking. None of this in my fitness journey was really for aesthetics ever. That is a bonus part for me that I feel like I look good in my body, but the biggest thing was that I feel good in my body, that my body is able to do the things that it needs to do. And then to have like my gut health be completely changed and not be bloated and not have all of these IBS symptoms has been like worth the whole thing. The whole thing. And then I still can go out and have that like fatty meal every once in a while and go out to the fancy dinner and not be wrecked in the morning. That's huge. So yeah, and that will be different for everybody. As I say, like bodies are different. What worked for me may not necessarily work for you. I am not a dietitian, I'm not a nutritionist. I am just telling you what has worked for me and what has worked for me was trying something different. So maybe try something different if you're not feeling good in your body. The last thing that I didn't really get to all the way was the full check-in sheet that I did every couple of weeks with my trainer. And um, and I think that it is a kind of it could be helpful for you. So I talked about progress picks. So every check-in, I was taking pictures of myself from the front, side, and back, mostly naked. I was just in my skivmies and from the same angles. I tried to do it like the same way every single time, in the same lighting, like same time of the day, in the same room with the same background ground, so that like you could. See the same thing. You were comparing apples to apples. I also had to check in with my weight. And when you the rule was when I weighed myself, it needed to be first thing in the morning, before you ate or drank anything, after you peed, and naked. My robe weighs two pounds, y'all. I have learned this. And your pee and your poo, those also weigh a lot. The pee more than the poo, it turns out. Um, things you didn't want to know that now you know. You're welcome. This is what happens when you listen to a GI nurse. I don't care about these things. Uh, then I had to check in um and let them know if I hit all of my workouts and my cardio and how much cardio is currently doing. And um, or if I didn't. And there was never any shaming. There was just like discussions. Okay, how could we? I mean, I I think I almost always hit everything. I think I maybe missed a couple of workouts. There was one thing that my trainer said. She said, You are my most consistent client. Like I know exactly what I'm gonna get with you. But that's just how I am. If you give me something to do and I have committed to it, I'm going to do it to the best of my ability. And sometimes you miss one or two because you were on vacation and you thought, it is what it is. I had to check in with all of I all of what my calories and protein goals were, and then send screenshots of all of what I had tracked over that time period. And if I wasn't able to track something, then I let her know that she was also there to help me track things, um, which was great, especially when I was on vacation. I was like, I don't know how to enter this. And she would help me like guesstimate it as best I could. And there were also times where we were like, we're not tracking this because we're on vacation and F it. Like it's just a short period of time, it's not gonna make or break you. And that is something that you have to like set up in your life. If you stay on track, like most of the time, you are gonna be fine. And that big meal on Thanksgiving or Christmas or the holidays is fine. If it's every day for the six weeks during the holidays, then less fine. You catch my drift. Then here's where it got really important, I think, for me and for people in general. How many hours of sleep are you averaging nightly? Sleep is huge. That is when you are resting, recovering, you you're able to make your like growth hormones, all of those things are doing their things. Sleep is so important. And if you weren't getting enough sleep, then they were okay, how do so then they were dressing? How do we then do it? How do we fix it? Um, how many steps are you getting in daily? My goal was 8,500. Um, and I would just average it out over the week so long as I was getting about that. Cause there's some days where I'm working at the hospital and I'm getting like 10 to 12,000 steps, and then the next day I'm like, I cannot move and I'm only getting 6,000 steps, but I was still hitting that average, no problem. Um, how much water was I drinking? Again, my goal was 90 ounces. Um, and I was tracking that so that I knew that I was getting it. This was another big one. Please rate your stress level this week one to 10. Um, and that was another thing. Stress can really like make it difficult for you to lose weight. Uh, if you were a female client, are you on your period? That will change your weight for sure. My friend, my female friends know that. I also had to answer how are you feeling mentally and physically? Um, and then they would use that to adjust things if needed. And then additional feedback or questions, or if I had new goals, they would incorporate that. And then I loved this one. Compliment yourself on something you're doing well or something that's going well in your life. I think that's so important to like remember to like be like, yeah, like the it's so easy to focus on the pieces that aren't going well. Like I missed this workout and I didn't hit my protein goal and whatever. But you but maybe it's like I only missed one workout and the week before I missed four or whatever. So I'm like, I'm doing really well at that. So it could have been on anything, which was great. So that was all of like my check-in things. And I think that is like a great thing, great tool. Like, you don't have to have a trainer, you could just do a check-in with yourself. And it doesn't have to be about weight loss either. And you don't have to include all of that. But I think those are all like great things to just kind of like do a check-in with yourself. It's so important to like see where you're at every once in a while. And if you're consistent and you're answering the same questions over and over, it can be like a really nice like data point for you to check in if you're especially if you're a data person. I know this has been like a long episode, but just a couple more things. There was just a lot that I didn't get to, it turns out. Um logging the week ahead. So I had talked about that. I had to log things ahead of time. And sometimes that was just for the day. She really wanted me to have at least three days, if not the whole week, logged ahead, which meant meal planning. And this will help next week. I will again do my meal planning hacks. And this was a game changer because I didn't have to think every day. I didn't, it removed that daily decision fatigue for me. And then also I knew I didn't log every single snack. I logged my main meals and then a couple of snacks. And then I knew, okay, I'm going out with friends on Saturday. I'm going out to eat. I would look ahead at the menu. So I already knew what I was going to order and knew that it was going to fit within my goals. If it was something that I could do that for. Again, there are days where like and times where that doesn't work. Or I know I'm going to have an uh a cocktail and I'm going to and I'll leave room for that this week by maybe eating a few less calories this day and I'll save them for that day. And we really looked at my stuff as a week, not by the day. Um, because that is honestly the better way to look at it, in my opinion. Yeah, so that was that was a game changer for me. And then also for me, like alluding to that, to that cocktail, um, I personally prefer to eat my calories. So for me, I basically stopped drinking any single calories unless it was a protein shake. And even then, I don't love protein shakes. I like to chew. I've told you, I'm hungry all the time. I want to eat things. So that's the way I try to do it. And then um, I don't drink any of my calories. I like I've said last week, um, diet sodas, the little flavor packets. I say don't drink calories. Sometimes those have like five or 10 calories. That's basically nothing. So um, I'll throw those in if I need a little flavoring. Tea is fantastic. Um, and they have cold brew teas too that you can just throw in your water bottle and like leave through the day. I am spoiled and I have a RO system in my house, and now I can't drink water. That's not RO. I'm because I'm spoiled and everything else tastes bad now. So I have to put flavoring in it. But yeah, eating my calories, I need that as a mover, as a performer. Like that is what I need for my body. And you may not. I look at other people's meals and I'm like, man, that is how are they, how is that lunch gonna fill them up for the next four, five, six hours? I don't understand, but it does. I'm not like that. Because again, we all be different. You gotta find what works for you. So, okay, I'm done. I'm done with all of those points. I just wanna say that this is not about perfection. None of this is about perfection. None of us are perfect. Those of us who are recovering perfectionists, this is for you. This is for me. It's not about being perfect. It's about being consistent, it's about getting information. That's all it is. Uh, next week I'm gonna be chatting about meal preps, all my meal prep hacks, how I do it, what made it easy for me and continues to make it easier for me. I also enlisted help from one of the Facebook groups I'm in for their meal prep and meal planning hacks. So I got lots of it for you. I want to thank my patrons on Patreon for supporting me and all of my work, even when it seems like it's outside the box and I do weird things like this. Uh, thank you for supporting me and everything. Thank you for trusting me. I couldn't do it without you. If you have requests for future episodes, please reach out to me. You can DM me. I would love it if this resonated with you, if this helped you in some way, if you shared it, gave me a review, or subscribed. It really helps me out. I appreciate all of you listening. Thank you for being here. I couldn't do it without you. This has been the Arial Alchemist. Now go create some magic of your own. Happy flying.