Transcript #443 How to Heal Your Metabolism with Kate Deering

Transcript #443 How to Heal Your Metabolism with Kate Deering

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1. Find out what’s in store for this Myers Detox Podcast with Kate Deering, who joins the show to talk about how you can heal your metabolism. Kate goes into so many important topics regarding your metabolism, like the major impact that stress has on it, the best diets to promote a healthy metabolism, your thyroid’s role in its processes, and the best tips and tricks to promote a healthy metabolism through lifestyle. Many people suffer from unhealthy metabolism, but there’s so many things you can do to help heal it, so tune in to learn what you can do to heal your metabolism!
2. Find out why Kate got into the field of health.
3. Learn about metabolism, what it is and how it works.
4. Find out what happens in the body for you to have a low metabolism.
5. Learn about some of the symptoms of a high metabolism.
6. Learn about the impact stress has on the many functions of metabolism, and why it must be addressed.
7. Find out how different foods affect your metabolism, the best foods to eat, and the foods you need to stay away from.
8. Is keto a good diet for healthy metabolism? Learn more.
9. Healthy sugars play an important role in healthy metabolism. Find out what foods are best.
10. Learn more about Kate’s book How to Heal your Metabolism.
11. Find out Kate’s top tips for those who are having trouble losing weight and maintaining a healthy metabolism.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Hello everyone. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com. Welcome to the Meyers Detox podcast. On this show, I talk about everything related to how to address the underlying root causes of your health and detox your body. We talked about what heavy metals and chemicals are doing to your health. We talk about other topics as well, and today we’re talking about how to heal your metabolism. I have expert Kate Deering on the show, and she’s going to be talking about all the different things that impact and negatively impact your metabolism, you know, like your diet, but we mainly talk about stress and how stress is really the big factor that plummets people’s metabolism. It’s not always their diet. They’re eating too many carbs and things like that. We talk about calorie restriction. We talk about how exactly stress impacts the body and impacts your thyroid because as soon as you’re stressed out, your thyroid function starts lowering, and then it has this downstream effect on your ability to maintain a hot body temperature, which will burn more calories.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And we just talk about a lot of different aspects related to how to improve your metabolism, how to heal it. We talk about concerns with perimenopausal and menopausal women specifically who are trying everything to lose weight, and it’s not just working. We also talk about the Keto diet, the short-term benefits and long-term pitfalls, and lots of really good info. Kate really knows what she’s talking about, and she also talks about this in her book, How to Heal your Metabolism. So this is the condensed version of her book, but a great show. Got to pay attention if you’re trying to lose weight.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And I know you guys listening to this show are concerned about your heavy metal toxin load and are concerned about detoxing your body, so I created a quiz called heavymetalsquiz.com. Take two minutes to take the quiz, which will give you your relative level, body burden of toxins based on your answer to all the questions, kind of your lifestyle, and diet. So take the quiz, and you get a free video series answering all of your most frequently asked questions about detoxing your body. So check it out, heavymetalsquiz.com.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Our guest today, Kate Deering, for over 25 years, she’s been involved in the health and fitness industry, helping men and women of all ages achieve optimal health and wellness. So her practice is based on a holistic approach to health and wellness by looking at the person’s entireties, or their well-being, including diet, stress, exercise, posture, sleep, digestion, hormones, mindset, and lifestyle, and she believes in maintaining all of these key components are vital to a person’s overall health and happiness, and her expertise is based on certifications such as the CHEK exercise coach, CHEK holistic lifestyle coach, Olympic lifting coach, resistive-stretching practitioner, and she’s also a certified nutritional consultant. You can learn more about Kate and her work at katedeering.com. Kate, thank you so much for coming to the show.

Kate Deering: Well, thank you so much for having me, Wendy, appreciate it.

Dr. Wendy Myers: So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into health, and you have a book on metabolism. How did you get into all that?

Kate Deering: So I have been in the health and fitness industry probably for the last, let’s see, how old am I? 28 years, so I started with degrees in psychology and exercise physiology in college, got out. Then I ran health clubs for about 10 years. When I moved out to California, I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore, so I started to get into more personal training, and as I got more into training, you realized that it’s such a big component of getting people healthy is nutrition, so I started to do deep dive into nutrition as a clinical nutritional coach. I studied with the CHEK Institute, and so I kind of went down a lot of different paths to figure out kind of what seemed to work properly, and of course, as you go do them, you learn different things and then came across the work of Ray Peat, and you know, a little bit of Morley Robins and Broda Barnes, Han Selye and so that kind of has evolved my thoughts now into where I am so now I just primarily do nutrition coaching with some training on the side.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. And so your focus is metabolism, and that’s what you wrote your book about, so what is metabolism exactly? Can you kind of expand on, I think-

Kate Deering: Sure.

Dr. Wendy Myers: I have a basic idea, but what’s the full picture?

Kate Deering: Yeah, and I think it’s a really good question ’cause I think a lot of people have a misconception about what it is. I think most people just think it’s burning calories. Like you have a high or low metabolism. I burn a lot of calories. I don’t burn a lot of calories, and there’s some truth to that. Ultimately though, metabolism is a sum of every metabolic process that’s going on in your body. It’s how your body essentially converts food into energy. And so some people do that well and others not so well. Where we get into the burning calorie situation is because you can have a very stressed metabolism, and we have different pathways when we’re stressed at how we utilize energy, and then we have a very normal high thyroid or not yeah, high working thyroid function, and that produces a good metabolic function in your whole system, so that’s more of like you have a well running basal metabolic rate or resting metabolic rate. So I always think that’s a good assessment of how healthy someone is and how much energy they’re burning at rest.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. And so, what does a low metabolism look like exactly?

Kate Deering: So a low metabolism, like a general lab, might look like high TSH. That’s kind of what your practitioner’s going to tell you. Symptomatically or what we also look at that you might not need a lab for, is your basal temperature. It should be around low. We’re talking low. Low metabolism would be more like low body temperature, very low pulse, sleep issues and a hard time losing weight. It can be high or low blood pressure, poor skin health, poor hair health, constipation, or diarrhea. Hormonal imbalances so PMS, infertility issues, don’t want no libido, so essentially everything slows down when you’re in a slow metabolic rate, but on some levels, because your body’s trying to always kind of keep up with the stresses around you, you can also burn a lot of calories and have a low basal metabolism, essentially, because then we’re just trying to stress the system.

Kate Deering: So your body’s using high cortisol, which will essentially suppress thyroid function, and so yes, these people can actually be burning lots of calories, but we’re burning them in the wrong way, and the reason you would know you’re actually still low thyroid is you’ll have more symptoms, sleep issues, constipation, right? Those are the people that say they’re burning a lot of calories, but then you look at them, and you’re like, you have every symptom of somebody that is actually hypothyroid.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, great. Yeah. And so you said they have low TSH, that’s the thyroid stimulating hormone, and they have low thyroid functioning.

Kate Deering: Yeah. So I should reiterate that a low thyroid report person will have a high TSH, and someone with an optimal thyroid will have a lower TSH.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes, exactly that’s what I meant. Sorry.

Kate Deering: Yeah.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, and then what does someone look like that has a high metabolism? What is that like?

Kate Deering: So a healthy-

Dr. Wendy Myers: I’m very, I don’t like those people, but who are they?

Kate Deering: So a healthy metabolism would look like your body temperature. The ideal body temperature would be about 98.6. It can be around 97.8 or 98 when you’re awake. It’s going to be a little bit lower. Your resting heart rate will be between 75 and 90 beats a minute. You’ll have healthy hair and healthy skin, and you’ll have a healthy bowel movement. So you’ll have a bowel daily. It’s going to be like a normal stool, not too loose. So you’re not excessively going to the bathroom. You might be urinating four or five times a day, not 25 times a day. You can sleep through the night, deep sleep through the night without not waking, you’ll have a healthy libido, pain-free periods, fertile, and you’ll want to have sex. All of those things would be synonymous with somebody’s system running well, ’cause then we know that they’re using energy well and they have enough energy coming in to support all of their systems.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so, and then what about stress? So how does stress factor into that? We’re all dealing with a lot of different types of stress. I mean, people are unaware of the amount of stress that they’re dealing with. How does stress affect our metabolism?

Kate Deering: So stress is like your thyroid’s worst enemy. So in a high-stress state, the thyroid’s always going to be suppressed. So on a short-term basis, like working out, so actually when you go work out, your thyroid is slightly suppressed, and that’s okay. That’s a normal function of what happens when you’re working out, but when you get out of that, it should return back to a normal function, right? We should be able to recover quite well, and now our body’s working more optimally. So short-term acute stresses are fine for our system as long as we can handle them. It’s now in this world. We’re all under some level, or not everybody, but a good bit of people are under chronic stress, and so when you’re under chronic stress, your thyroid stays suppressed for long periods of time. That’s when you kind of see these hypothyroid states or even subclinical hypothyroid states.

Kate Deering: And what tends to happen is, is because your body is always trying to stay in some sort of homeostasis, and it’s trying to keep up with the energy demands of stress. And let me just define what stress means in my world. I would say stress is anytime your body has more demands than it has available energy, and so we elicit a stress response when that happens, and that’s a good thing and it certainly because that keeps us alive, right? If we didn’t have those mechanisms, then we would die. If we didn’t have usable energy and we had more demands on our system. So it’s all good until we stay in those kinds of pathways. So we’re under chronic cortisol elevation, and adrenaline and other stress hormones stay elevated, and that’s when we start to see symptoms, illness, and disease because your body has these adaptive mechanisms to try to keep up with what’s going on, but it comes at a cost long term.

Kate Deering: So we’re all, like I said, and that’s where I come back to the place of people can still burn a lot of calories in a hypothyroid state if their system is running down the adaptive pathways of high cortisol by adrenaline. There’s other serotonin, prolactin, all of those kinds start seeing elevated and then that’s when we start to see problems. So I think that’s where people get confused because they’re like, hey, I’m thin, or hey, I eat a lot, and I’m still thin, but I can’t sleep, and I’m constipated, or I have no sex drive, but I’m an athlete, so I’m healthy, and you see that a lot in the people that are very, very athletic or endurance athletes where yes, they look healthy and thin, yet they have a lot of metabolic issues.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, yeah. And that’s the thing. A lot of people with diabetes are super, super thin also as well. It’s just you can’t let that fool you-

Kate Deering: So-

Dr. Wendy Myers:  and that’s right, but what are some of the best foods that support metabolism?

Kate Deering: So if we just look at it as far as first as energy, we always want to make sure that we have enough energy to support the demands on our bodies. So our body’s best source of energy is always going to come in the form of carbohydrates. Your body likes carbohydrates, and it’s easier to utilize. It produces more things like carbon dioxide, actually produces more ATP or more heat, and so our body prefers those resources. Now, when I say carbohydrates, people are like, oh, I can just go eat like a cookie or a loaf of bread, and I’m like, not really what I’m referencing, and of course, when we refer to things like cookies or cakes, those aren’t just carbohydrates, there’s lots of fat in those foods. So usually, what I’m referring to are carbohydrates that are going to contain a lot of nutrition. And those usually come in the forms of fruits, juices, root vegetables, vegetables, not all vegetables, more cooked vegetables, honey, things that are easily accessible that our body doesn’t have a really, really hard time breaking down and can utilize its energy to support the system.

Kate Deering: Now, that doesn’t mean that you need to go out and just consume a ton of these foods with nothing else because you’re going to create problems, and there’s always a balance with your system. And so we have to learn to not take everything out of context or try to go to these extremes, but when you do eat and consume carbohydrates, you always want to make sure they are balanced with enough protein or some fat to make sure that they’re not rushing into your system too quickly, because then you can start creating some blood sugar issues, but you do want those nutrient rich carbohydrates because again, carbohydrates or sugars alone will improve metabolic rate.

Kate Deering: They actually speed things up, and so when you speed up your body’s ability to utilize fuel, you need all the other cofactors that go with it, and those are all your vitamins and your minerals that all support that process. So just consuming copious amounts of white sugar would be a bad idea. It would speed up your metabolism, but because it would speed things up without any nutrition, you would start seeing a lot of nutritional deficiencies, and I think that’s what we sometimes see in people that maybe even eat a high carbohydrate, processed food as they start creating a lot of nutritional deficiencies and so isn’t necessarily the sugar, maybe not. It could just be that they don’t have enough nutrition to support their current diet.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And what are your thoughts on like the Keto diet and reducing carbs drastically for weight loss or doing that diet long term?

Kate Deering: So it certainly does work certainly for weight loss. I mean, anytime you remove an entire macronutrient, you’re just going to reduce calorie consumption, and so for a lot of people in weight loss, that’s what you’re doing. Total calorie consumption is going to go down. If you remove all carbohydrates and you just eat a diet of fat and protein, you will have a significant calorie deficit, and the primary way people lose weight is to go into a calorie deficit. You have to be consuming less energy than you are burning. So for some people, it seems to be an easy route because they’re like, well, if I don’t consume any carbohydrates, fat and protein will certainly reduce that, and you’ll eat less.

Kate Deering: As far as a long-term answer for health and a fat reduction, what I tend to see at about three to four years of people doing that and what I actually see is that people that do Keto and some do it for weight loss, but a lot of other people do it for health reasons, maybe an autoimmune issue or digestive issues and so forth. So it does work. It seems to work for those people for, like I said, these 2, 3, and 4-year periods. And then, at some point, especially, I see in women as they start to have a lot of hormonal issues or their hair starts to fall out, or they start to have really bad sleep issues. You definitely see things like high cholesterol in these individuals, and sometimes you’ll start to see some low thyroid function because sugar in itself is needed or carbohydrates or glucose is needed for so many functions, but one of the primary ones is it’s needed to convert your inactive thyroid T4, to active thyroid T3 in the liver, which is about 80% of your thyroid number. A thyroid that you’re needing.

Kate Deering: So by hindering glucose, you are going to start to inhibit that process and also the liver in itself, because if you go, Keto, they’re going to start utilizing ketones as energy as well. Your liver can’t use ketones as energy. Your brain can, which is actually usually the number one glucose consumer, but under a state of starvation or ketogenic diet, it can use ketones. The liver cannot. The liver still needs to utilize glucose on some level of fat, so we start to see some inactivity in the liver, and that can create other effects, low thyroid function, high cortisol, long term in individuals. What I see kind of mainstream is a lot of the Keto, or even carnivore people are starting to now utilize carbohydrate feeding times strategically. That seems to be the new kind of thing, and utilizing honey, maybe some fruits into their diet to kind of help this. So we’ll kind of see, I think, what this kind of brings in the future, but that seems to be the trend right now.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. Keto, but eating carbs.

Kate Deering: And maybe they can make it work that a little bit and where they have these feeding times, but if you go, Keto, I mean, a lot of the premise is to reduce insulin. We want to become more insulin sensitive, and they do reduce their insulin levels, but they also can do it in a state when they introduce carbohydrates back in. It almost looks like they have a diabetic state because all those numbers shoot back up because their body is kind of adapted to not utilizing glucose. So in my view, any diet you’re on should eventually go to a place where you are able to eat a variety of different foods. So maybe you go on it for a certain period of time to get a result, but at the end of it, if you can now no longer consume carbohydrates because now you’re just kind of glucose intolerant, well, I’m not sure that that’s the right diet long term. I mean, there are so many good things that you get from carbohydrates, especially all the minerals and nutrients, so to completely eliminate those doesn’t seem to be a long-term answer, in my opinion.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. When I was doing, when I first started looking at my diet, I did the Atkins Diet, which is the Keto version, and I looked at the carbohydrates on my vegetables, like, oh my God, an artichoke has 17 grams of carbohydrates, and then I was looking at other vegetables, and I thought, this is crazy to even be thinking about the amount of carbs are in vegetables that are healthy foods and to restrict them because the carbohydrate intake and I just, for me, on its face, just did not make any logical sense. If it’s just you’re just trying to lose weight. Eat your vegetables. They’re healthy.

Kate Deering: Yeah. I mean, and I think everything has to be taken into the context of the individual. So I’m very much about the person and where they are right now and how their body is utilizing carbohydrates. If you are complete, if you’re a diabetic or if you have some sort of glucose intolerance because of a lot of stress in your life, then consuming copious amounts of any carbohydrate might have an adverse effect on you. So we have to understand where somebody is at initially and might go. Hey, if you’re having some issues, maybe we have to address some other things first before we start incorporating some of these other foods.

Kate Deering: So I mean, to me, healing is always in layers. It’s not just a here’s approach, do this, and you’re done. It’s understanding where you are right now. Let’s kind of uncover that. Maybe we need to support you here first so that you can tolerate these things first, but we should always be building on those layers so eventually, someone can come back and go, okay, I can eat all these foods, and I’m good, and there’s no problems, and to me, that’s a successful dietary approach.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. And so, what are some of the best healthy sugars that people should be eating?

Kate Deering: Well, like I said, the best ones are always going to be sugars, and I kind of use all these words interchangeably. Glucose, sugar, and carbohydrates are going to be the ones that have the most nutrition, and so high nutrient sugars and carbs are going to be your fruits, right? Tons of minerals in those that your body utilizes, plus they have fructose which can help also balance your blood sugar. The roots, right? Potatoes can be a great source, super high in potassium, tons of nutrition in potatoes, love potatoes. However, for some people, they don’t work, and so again, there’s nothing all in, and you know, yes for everything. It’s kind of look at your system.

Kate Deering: Vegetables can be an energy source, but most vegetables aren’t great because most of them don’t have a lot of energy. They are super high in fiber, and for a lot of people, especially in their raw state, a lot of vegetables are not a good option initially because they don’t carry a lot of energy. They’re low-calorie foods, and so when we come into a place of healing, we have to teach somebody’s system to utilize energy better. This means we want to take some of the burdens off of their system, and for your body to break down something like spinach or raw spinach takes energy. We can’t just… All the systems of your body require fuel, and you put it into the digestive system. That’s raw food that has basically no fuel in it, so we’re actually taking energy to break down this food.

Kate Deering: Now, again, I don’t want to say spinach is necessarily bad, but in a system that’s underworking, it might not be the best food for them because it’s taking so much energy to break down and for those people, what you’re going to see is in their stool, right? When they review it, if they want to, they’re going to see bits and pieces of these raw vegetables in there, meaning their system really couldn’t break it down very well, and if our system can’t break that food down, then we’re probably not getting the nutrition that that food should be supplied to them. So it’s not just what is in the food initially. It’s, is your body able to break it down? And is it able to take out and absorb the nutrients? And if it isn’t, then that food is obsolete. What’s the point of it? It might just be creating some GI issues because your body can’t break it down.

Kate Deering: Again, it doesn’t mean you should never eat that. It just means we need to take your system into account and how well it’s functioning because what I come across is that so many people have constipation issues. Their GI system is so under-powered. Our digestion has to work in that parasympathetic rest and digest state, and if you’re chronically in a stressed state, you’re going to have GI issues, and so giving it all of these hard-to-digest, raw vegetables creates more issues in these people. And so temporarily, or you can cook them, that does tend to help, so cooking them up, that makes them easier to break down for the human body can also be helpful but I find that fruits are like easier for them to assimilate and utilize and even fruit juices can be helpful for these individual while they go through a healing process.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Right. Interesting. Very interesting. And so let’s talk about your book, so How to Heal your Metabolism. So what are some of the topics that you cover in the book?

Kate Deering: So I certainly give you an overview of what metabolism is, kind of what we talked about here, so people can have a basic understanding. I really try to break it down into really easily digestible chapters so that it’s not too complex without being too sciencey, but we talk about certain carbohydrates, understanding what sugars are, and understanding what the best ones are to fuel your system. I talk about saturated fats versus polyunsaturated fats. I talk about protein, how much you need, and what are the best sources of protein? What sources may not be best as far as in abundance. I will talk about dairy. I’m a huge proponent of dairy. I love dairy. I think it gets a bad rap, and so I think it’s a superfood and that most people probably, if you cannot tolerate it, I have chapters in there and talk about how you can learn to get your body to re tolerate dairy and how you should do that.

Kate Deering: We talk about salt, exercise, and general happiness. There are a lot of chapters. There’s a lot going on in that book. I kind of just talk about a lot of these things and why we don’t have a lot of science. Unlike water, we have a general understanding that we should all have 64 ounces of water a day, and there’s absolutely zero scientific evidence on that. I don’t know where that came from, but there’s no understanding, and so for some people, they’re walking around with their, I’ve worked with fitness trainers, and they walk around with their gallon of water all day long and only to find that they’re peeing like 20 times a day and then they can’t sleep. And for those individuals, I’m like, look, you’re just pissing out minerals, and you’re not getting, and you’re just putting stress on your kidneys and bladder.

Kate Deering: So we kind of pull them back and maybe give them things like coconut water, fruit, or other high nutrient dense foods throughout the day, and they stop drinking all that water, and all of a sudden, they stop peeing all the time. They sleep through the night, and they just feel better. So not saying water’s bad, don’t get that idea but nowhere in your body is there just water. There’s always water in minerals, so usually, those things should be combined together to help really hydrate you, but we don’t talk about that. Everyone’s like, just drink a ton of water, you’re good. I’m like, mm-mm. So I go through a lot of thoughts or myths around the industry and kind of go through and say, hey, this is kind of really what’s happening.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah. I love that. Because I think a lot of people, they, they don’t understand about water and they’re drinking way too much. Okay? I hear people boast they drink three liters of water today or four liters. They do that every single day, and you really need to listen to your body. Your body will cry for the water if you use your thirst as your guide.

Kate Deering: And your pee, right?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Kate Deering: And use your pee for your guide, like it is clear as a bell, and you are peeing 20 times a day. It’s too much, right?

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Kate Deering: It’s just too much, but that’s where, when people hear these blanket statements, everyone’s like, oh, I’m going to do that now, and I’m going to do that, and I don’t think nutrition or healing or supporting metabolism is very black and white. It’s very like, where are you right now, and where can we support you in where you’re at? Because someone who has diabetes is going to be very different from a 25-year-old woman that maybe just has PMS issues, so it’s a different ballgame. You can use some of the general concepts as the same, but you have to kind of understand where you’re at right now to get yourself better.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Okay, fantastic. So any tips you have for people, for women that are like, there are a lot of women listening to that are menopausal, perimenopausal, and they can’t lose weight. Any kind of just general tips to maybe help them feel a little bit more hopeful, especially the women that are exercising every day and restricting their diet and they just, no matter what they do, they just can’t seem to lose weight?

Kate Deering: Yes. So I get that. I mean, I hit 50 this year, so it’s all the start of the menopausal years. I think it shouldn’t be feared.  I think that we put these beliefs around menopause. I’m like, look, this is a very normal process that women go through. We just have to learn how to support ourselves, so I am under the assumption that most women that are probably here at this time have probably been living a pretty stressful life. At least those are the ones I come across that are having these issues and sometimes tagging on now more exercise, and more restriction is just they’re fighting against their system at this point and so what I would say is, hey, you know, take a little time and A, I love food logging apps. I think they’re super educational or super helpful if you have the bandwidth to do them, but if you do, using something like Chronometer or My Fitness Pal and logging your food down and then taking your temperature and pulse maybe in the morning or after you are eating to kind of see where your baseline is.

Kate Deering: So that’s how I work with people like, hey, where are you at? Are you running cold? If what I find is a lot of women premenopausal, or actually now in their twenties or thirties and even forties, fifties, they’re cool. They’re 95 degrees. They’re 96 degrees, so we already know right then if your baseline is running much lower than it should, and so if we try to add more stress on your system, it’s already struggling. We know that reduction in body temperature is an adaptation of your system to try to reserve energy. You’re not producing as much heat. Your body’s reserving energy, so you’re already starting at below the level of normal, and so we have to build up that foundation first. We have to get our bodies to utilize energy better so that they can produce more heat.

Kate Deering: And so, you know, if they’re finding, hey, I can’t lose weight on 1400 calories. Okay, well that’s too little already, right? We know that your body’s not going to function well on 1400 calories, especially if these are women that are running a household, maybe still have kids or dealing with stress or have jobs or whatever, you cannot manage your day on 1400 calories, and so we have to learn to build their energy output up. So we have to slowly increase calories, slowly but surely, while kind of supporting the stress, trying to find places to reduce stress, trying to get them to bed earlier ’cause we know all those things are going to help them metabolically improve.

Kate Deering: And at that baseline, and then what I do is get them up to about 1800, 2000 plus calories and so then ultimately the way you’re going to lose weight at any stage of your life is to ultimately take in more or take in less energy than you’re burning, but if we get you up to being able to burn 2000 calories, then we know we can add in some light exercise. We know we can add in some sun, which helps improve metabolic rate and maybe a slight calorie deficit at that point in time to help initiate some fat loss but again, to me, when you come up to menopause, it’s basically, yes, your body. Menopause is a stress on the system for any woman, and so we have to learn to balance that stress and how we can alleviate it and not push against it. And in my opinion, when someone goes through menopause, and now they’re trying to restrict more and exercise more, they are now pushing against that, and they’re just pushing against the wall that’s not going to move.

Kate Deering: And so they have to kind of go back and kind of find out, okay, I got to support my system better. What does that look like? I got to get my body to be able to utilize energy better, and what does that look like? Because what I see today is that what’s being recommended to menopausal women is ketogenic, low carb diets and just exercise more and again, maybe that will work short term, but I think it’s the actual worst approach for them on a long term basis again-

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah.

Kate Deering: Because they’re not addressing the foundation of where they’re at right now, and you need to know what that is. Again, we can’t build a good house, can’t build a healthy body on a cracked foundation because you’re going to get into more trouble long term.

Dr. Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s such a good explanation. I haven’t had that explanation with the show before. Really good explanations of the underlying root causes of what is thwarting women and perimenopausal and menopausal women’s efforts for sure. People are so stressed today, and it is just a wrecking ball for your metabolism. So everyone, thanks so much for tuning in today, and Kate, go out and get Kate Deering’s book How to Heal your Metabolism. Kate, thanks so much for coming to the show.

Kate Deering: Yeah. My pleasure Wendy, anytime.

Dr. Wendy Myers: And why can we find your website in your work and work with you?

Kate Deering: So my website is katedeering.com, and you can find me on Instagram and Facebook at @katedeeringfitness, so I put out free information. I have a bunch of information on there about estrogen, progesterone hormones, and just a different thought and theories on what is happening that maybe your doctor hasn’t talked to you about.

Dr. Wendy Myers: So Kate, thank you so much for coming to the show. That was fantastic info, and everyone, thanks so much for tuning into the Myers Detox Podcast, where I try to have the world’s experts every week come on to teach you how to live your best life because you deserve to feel good and I know that a lot of people have different missing pieces of the puzzle. They’re trying to figure this whole puzzle out, so that’s what I try to do every week, and I love doing it as well. So thanks for tuning in. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers of myersdetox.com. I’ll talk to you guys next week.