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0:00 I want to talk about the actual way to utilize walking to break through fat loss plateaus. It's never coming down to effort. It's always coming down to adaptation. It just means we need to send better signals. You can use walking in so many different ways to actually avoid weight loss plateaus. Hello everyone and welcome back to the latest episode of the Metabolism and Menopause Podcast. My name is Stephanie and I am your host and CEO of Vitality OET. We are women's nutrition, health, and fitness coaching company that focuses predominantly on women's hormones, particularly as they start going through pmenopause and onwards. We know that you start experiencing so many changes in this time of your life.
0:46 Whether it's the hot flashes, the night sweats, irritability, brain fog, or weight gainer in the middle that seems to come out of absolutely nowhere despite you not changing anything. So, you go back to those tried and true methods of cutting calories, cutting carbs, doing a bunch of cardio, yet it feels like nothing is working. You're putting in all this effort, and you're just moving backwards. But we know now that your body is inherently different. So, our mission here at Vitality is to really help you understand how your body changes in this time in your life so you can reach those health and fitness goals, feel in control and at home in your body again, live a life full of vitality, and really understand how to take care of this new body of yours. And so today I want to talk about the actual way to utilize walking to break through
1:33 fat loss plateaus. Because a lot of people don't realize that you can use walking in so many different ways to actually avoid weight loss plateaus or if your fat loss starts to plateau to break through that so you can continue to see those changes specifically when we're dealing with pmenopause, menopause in the years that follow. And so walking does work even though a lot of us feel like it doesn't. And this is where do you need to understand how this works first and then we'll talk about the 10 different ways to actually use walking to bust through those plateaus. And so flat loss plateaus, it's never coming down to effort. It's always coming down to adaptation. And so what I mean by this is that when we're in pmenopause,
2:19 menopause post-menopause your body becomes more stress sensitive. And so when we push harder, like trying to do the HIT trainings all the time or cutting our calories severely or doing the fasting or doing a ton of exercise, our body becomes stressed so much more easily than before. So before you could handle a 9 out of 10 before cortisol went up and we started to see all these negative side effects. Now it only takes a 5 out of 10. So externally you don't feel like you've changed anything. If anything, your habits have gotten better, but you're gaining weight or you're not seeing the changes that you should be seeing with the amount of effort that you're putting in. And this is because internally things have changed. And so now it's only taking a five out of 10 on the stress scale for
3:05 your cortisol to go up, which means that inflammation goes up and blocks fat burning. Hormone production decreases. That is going to control so many different mechanisms of fat loss as well. It's going to make your blood sugar worse. Even though you're eating less and moving more and cutting carbs and fasting and doing all the right things that are supposed to support your blood sugar, when cortisol goes up, it dumps sugar into your bloodstream even in the absence of food. that causes insulin to come up and pushes you into your fat storage state. And this is already an issue in pmenopause and menopause. When estrogen starts to decline, our blood sugar already gets worse. And so this really amplifies it. We see thyroid function starts to get worse. Your thyroid basically controls how well your body is at burning calories. So if your thyroid slows down,
3:52 your body gets worse at burning calories, which is obviously going to make weight loss harder and weight gain a lot easier. This happens when we hit that stress threshold as well. We see liver function starts to slow down, energy slows down, we see our sleep gets worse and all of these things push us into that fattorring state the harder that you push. And so this is where walking can really help avoid that overstress response causing that stall where you're pushing really hard because our cortisol isn't elevated as much. It supports our blood sugar regulation. It actually increases calories out without causing excess stress. So your body can actually see those changes and it keeps our nervous system in a much better place. And so when you get understand
4:37 this then you can start looking at walking as a way as a uh as a lever that you can pull. So, it's this little lever that you can pull to kind of, you know, push past that that loss threshold where you can continue to see changes because a lot of us, we get our steps in, we go for our walks, and we're not seeing changes. Here are 10 ways to help you actually see changes from the kind of walking that you are actually doing. And so, the first mistake that I usually see women make is they don't leave room to grow. So, what I mean by this is a lot of women decide they want to lose weight and they just start walking as much as they possibly can. You don't have room to pull that lever anymore. You've already pulled it all the way down. It's like you have this dial. Instead of just
5:24 increasing the dial two, you increase it to 100. It's maxed out. We don't have any more room to grow. So, for myself, I have a pretty sedentary job. you know, I'm sitting here, I'm podcasting, I'm at a desk, I'm doing calls with clients, all these kinds of things at a desk. So, for me, my step goal is not very high. I'm aim for like 6,000 steps a day on a good day. If I made 10,000 steps my minimum, and then I'm going into a fat loss phase and my fat loss stalls, for me to increase cap um my step count above 10,000 is really unrealistic and it's probably going to stress me out like behaviorally like psych psychologically because I'm stressed out that I can't hit my step count now. And so this is where you need to leave room
6:11 to grow so you slowly can continue to increase that dial to continue to see changes. If you start out at the max, you don't have room to grow. And for myself, I would much rather increase my steps by a thousand steps a day, 2,000 steps a day, than cut out 200 calories of food because I like food. I want to eat food. I want to eat food with my family. I want to go out for dinners, right? So, that's the first mistake I see is that people don't leave room to increase. Number two is we need to make sure that we are varying our intensity. There's lots of different ways that we can vary our walking so that our body doesn't adapt. So if you think about the gym for example, you are never going to build muscle if you're always doing the same weights every single time. So if you're going to
6:57 the fitness classes and you're always using 10 lb weights, your body has no reason to change because it can already do what you're asking it to do. That's like if you took a kid and put them in math class, but they always did the same math equations all the time. They're not going to learn anything because there's nothing stimulating them to learn something else. They're not their brain isn't being challenged, right? So, it's the same thing with the gym. The gym, if we aren't increasing our weights that we're lifting, we will never build muscle mass. We're not going to sculpt our body because nothing is changing. There's no new stimulus. tell our body, hey, we need to do something different. Stuff keeps trying to lift heavier. Therefore, we must lift make our biceps bigger. That's not happening. It goes, oh, I can lift those 10 pounds. No big
7:42 deal. Walking is the exact same way. If you're walking the same amount of time, the same distance, the same speed, the same route, your body has no reason to change. It can already accomplish what you're doing it. Right? So, the the example that I like to give is a marathon runner. If a marathon runner goes and runs a 5K, super easy, it's not going to be very challenging for them. Their body is not going to burn very many calories because they can already do the thing. Now, for myself, if I were to do a 5K, which I used to run track in in high school, I used to go to provincials. I used to do all the things. I was a long-distance runner. I gave that up many years ago. I decided I'd put in my miles. If I were to go run a 5K today, oh my gosh, I would be
8:31 exhausted. Super high stress on my body. My body would burn a ton of calories as it's trying to bring in all these resources cuz it's trying to meet this new demand that my body has never been challenged to do in a very long time. It's the same thing with walking. We need to change things, right? And then over time, if I continue training for that 5K, my body gets better and better and better at burning calories. That run becomes easier. My body adapts to be able to do that. Walking is the same way. And so, one thing that you can do to make sure that we're setting that new stimulus is varying your intensity. So, this is varying your speed or that the challenge of it, right? So, going for a nice leisurely stroll. This is what I would call it. Prayer walks. I'm not sweating.
9:19 I'm relaxing. They're nice and slow versus a brisk pace where, you know, you're running in and out of the grocery store because it's getting close to nap time and you know, my son's going to freak out. So, we are we are hustling through those grocery aisles or maybe you're walking up a hill. That also increases your intensity, right? And so, our body is going to adapt quickly to the same effort. So, we need to vary that effort. This doesn't mean every single walk has to look different. This means let's change it every couple weeks. Add in a different intensity, one day a week for 3 weeks and then we we change it up to something different. Um the next one that you can do is change the distance obviously. So instead of going for let's say a 1 km walk, we're
10:04 going to walk for 1 and 1/2 km one day or maybe we're putting in two half a kilometer walks that day instead. Varying your distance. Again, if we're trying to reduce predictability on your body, this doesn't mean you're changing it every single day. This means that we are strategically changing it every 3, four, 5 weeks to keep our body adjusting and guessing. You can change the duration, right? So, instead of walking for an hour, maybe we're doing 20 minutes 3 days a week instead of 1 hour once a week, whatever that looks like. So, changing your intensity, changing the distance that you're walking, and changing how long you're walking for. This is great, right? Instead of doing that 30-minute walk, do three little 10-minute walks.
10:50 It's your body perceives it very differently. The other way that you can use walks to bust through plateaus is to take a walk for 5 minutes after you eat. This helps support our blood sugar control and our insulin spikes, which we know get worse during permenopause and menopause. estrogen goes down, blood sugar control gets worse, pushes us into that storage state. We don't want that. So, doing a walk for 5 minutes after you eat is fantastic cuz it utilizes the food that you just consumed so your body is going to be more likely to use that as fuel instead of storing it as fat. And it only has to be 5 minutes. Doesn't have to be anything crazy. So, you know, have your your lunch on your lunch break and then go for a quick walk before you go sit down at your desk to continue on.
11:36 Splitting up your walks. Like I mentioned, this is another way to kind of manipulate things is, you know, if you are someone who is very high stress, you are very go go go, you are inflamed, if your blood sugar isn't so great, this splitting up your walks into smaller sections can help you so much more compared to doing one really long walk. Um, and so this just helps you throughout the day to stabilize your blood sugar to actually de-stress your body, supports detoxification, improves your digestion as well. There's a lot of things here that if you are very go go go, highly inflamed type A person, just doing two to three smaller walks throughout your day can be way more beneficial than just trying to do a longer one one time a day. If you want
12:22 to really challenge yourself, you can add a weighted vest to your walks. So, this is an advanced lever. I would probably only include this once you're kind of at that top range and you've pulled the other levers and we're wanting to see a little bit more change. But, you want to increase the weight of your vest slowly. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen women put on like 10, 15, 20 lb vest and they are so sore the next day because you're adding load to your spine, right? Your hips, your knees, your ankles. And what happens is if you have any sort of muscular imbalance, you will be very aware of where your body is compensating. Um, this is something that's going to involve more muscular involvement. Um, it is going to increase the energy demand on your body as well. So, it can
13:08 help you, but we want to make sure this is not a starting strategy. We want to increase this slowly if it's something that you do want to do. I personally did not use a walking vest. You don't have to. um it's just a tool that you can use um if you want. Another thing that other people don't think about when we're looking at varying walking to change our intensity is the terrain changes walking on uneven ground or sand, hills, grass, trails versus just walking on a sidewalk. And so the reason this is so beneficial is it increases the number of muscle fibers that you are using and the stability demand. You will naturally just recruit more muscles to help you stay balanced when you're walking on even terrain. More muscle fiber
13:54 involvement means higher calorie burn. This adds some novelty with your to your body without overstressing your nervous system too. So small changes can totally make a big effect in the long run. And so just walk on the grass one day a week or you know if you're lucky enough to live by the beach, go utilize that and go walk in the sand once a week. And again, just you don't have to change it up every single walk. We're choosing one of these things and adding it in and then swapping it out for something else in like 3 weeks. We're just adding a little bit of novelty here and there to keep our body adjusting. This is where walking can be really helpful for busting through fat loss plateaus. Recovery walks. Walking after a workout
14:39 can help with lactate clearance to help with recovery. But walking in between your workouts is super super great. Doing some mobility. Doing some walking. This will help with detoxification. This will help with better muscle recruitment. This is going to help you burn calories without overstressing your body. For a lot of women in our program, we're only working out like 3 days a week. For some people, it's only two. We are busy. And so having to push super hard or add extra days in the gym is not realistic for a lot of us. It's not for me. I'm working on creating 20-minute workout programs um in our exercise subscription program right now because so many women, myself included, to get to the gym to do 45 minutes of a workout, drive home, that is a big
15:25 commitment. And in depending what season you're in, it's not realistic and then you just feel like a failure. You end up not going at all. and then you lose all this momentum that you work so hard to build. And so doing some shorter workouts and then having the walking in between way easier to manage. Like if you tell me, oh, you only have to walk, you know, one 5 minute in the morning and then 15 minutes after work, that's so much easier for me than having to dedicate an hour or whatever it might be right? And then you can also look at adjusting your cadence and stride variability. So, taking shorter steps versus taking longer steps, that's going to change which muscles are used, right? Longer steps are going to activate your glutes a little bit more, your hamstrings a
16:11 little bit more because you're stretching those muscles more as you're stepping further. And so, again, we're just looking at how quickly we're walking and just adding in these different types of intensities and adjustments. It's such an easy way to add novelty without stress so you can keep seeing changes. So how much you walk matters just as much as how you walk or how far you walk. And so walking isn't this like fall back thing. It is something that if you use smart adjustments can continue to help you to lose fat where you typically would have stalled before. Plateaus do not mean that you need to work harder, that you have to put in more time, that you have to put in more discipline. It just means
16:58 we need to send better signals. And these micro adjustments are just examples of things that we do in our coaching with nutrition, with exercise, with stress things. There's so many things that you can do that are micro adjustments to keep your body going. But we need to again see which adjustments are best for you, what your body is going to respond to. We can't change everything at once, which is what people typically do at the beginning of the year because we want to see what does your body adapt to the best. What does it respond to the best and then what can we keep tweaking to continue to see results. Fat loss in this phase of life does not respond to force and all this crazy effort. Is there going to be some effort involved? Obviously, we still have to do the things, but it doesn't
17:43 have to be this massive time commitment. It doesn't have to be super sweaty. Sweaty does not mean effective. Anyone can make a workout sweaty. It's all about sending the right message at the right time in a to a body that can actually respond the right way. And if our body is overstressed because we're doing too much and eating too little, it's not going to respond the way that you anticipate it to, which is why so many women are frustrated. So send this episode to all of your friends to help them through their health and fitness journey by making these small tweaks to their walking routine. If you want access to our exercise subscription program, the link for that is in the show notes, or you can just message me. I love you so much. Here's to a fantastic 2026, and I'll talk to you
18:28 soon. Bye.
