Stop Weight Frustration In Midlife For Mind-blowing Breakthrough Results

Music provided by https://www.purple-planet.com/ 

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I am so excited to introduce you to Debbie Martin, a friend and fellow Trim Healthy coach.

 She is here today to talk to us about her Trim Healthy and weight loss journey after 50 and with insulin resistance.  

I can't wait to get to all of the good things. First, Debbie will tell us how she stumbled onto the Trim Healthy Way.  

"My name is Debbie Martin. I'm 50 years old. I turned 50 last year and feel so good about it. I am so excited about being 50. I am a mom of five kids. They're not kids anymore; they're all grown, and I've been a wife for 30 years.

I have had trouble with my weight throughout my whole life, and I came across trim healthy way back; I don't remember the exact year, but it was early. I didn't stick with it because I stalled and tried other things, came back to trim healthy, and didn't stick with it again because I stalled and thought, you know, there were other things to do. But no matter what I tried, it didn't matter, and I finally gave up, and I was like, I'm done. I've had it. I can't do this dieting thing anymore. It's over, and I'll just be what I am. I just wanted to be healthy, and I was in the shower crying out to God and asking him to help me. I knew he didn't want me to be sick, and that's basically what I was. I  just kept getting sick and just not well at all. I was the highest weight I had ever been, and nothing was working. It wasn't because of lack of discipline, because people call me extreme and radical in my way, so it's not because of lack of discipline. Just nothing would work, and so I just decided that I was going to give all of that dieting over to God, surrender it, and let him guide me to health. I knew I needed some kind of guide; I wasn't just going to drive through McDonald's all the time and be healthy. So I thought about all of the things I had done, all the diets, all the programs, all the fads, all the things, and the most sustainable in my everyday life that I felt I could stick with, which was trim healthy. So that's what I did, and I just committed to one year of learning the plan because it can be confusing and a little bit overwhelming; even the third time through, I didn't understand the fuels. So I just committed to a year of learning the plan, and I did, and I lost some weight. I felt good and was like, okay, I made it a year. I decided to keep going, and the following year, I thought of something new to challenge myself, so every year, I would do something to help me implement the plan better. 

But around the third year, I stalled for a while, and then I started to gain, and that's where I ended up until about six months ago."

I just love the commitment and tenacity that Debbie is showing us through her testimony. She didn't commit tot he scale or needin to see that number decrease. Her commitment was to herself, to learn a specific way of eating for her best health. 

So, we see that Debbie acheived weight loss success at first with Trim Healthy but when she hit that stall and in fact started gaining weight I asked her if she had doubts about her choice.

"I didn't even allow myself to go there in those thoughts. When I say I surrendered, I really did. I just got on the scale, but it wasn't that big of a deal to me because nothing else had worked. I just wanted to learn the plan, so that was where my head was. I found new recipes and learned, really learning what the fuels were and what foods I liked and which I didn't. Which did I want to build a recipe with, or did I just want to eat my meat and vegetables? I'm not a huge recipe person, but I was trying all kinds of them. So I really just spent that year just learning, and I was very focused on learning. I learned how to navigate the plan for me in a way that it didn't matter where I was; I could implement this, and it wasn't that there weren't any cheats, or there weren't any days off or anything like that. I just didn't view them the same way I had before. The three-hour eating window was just miraculous for me because I didn't have to start over in the morning, I didn't have to start over on Monday, I could start over the very next meal, and that was good, and with each time I would go longer and longer without cheating and without going off plan. The more I wanted to eat on plan, the more creative and prepared I became. I would start packing for vacations and taking a travel pantry with me. 

In that second year, people started noticing that I was changing. They noticed when we would go out that I was doing things differently, and so they started asking me questions. Eventually, I began to build a little Community around this Trim Healthy way of eating and living, and that made me want to learn more because they wanted me to teach them.

I was super excited. I just wanted to know everything and soak up everything that I could because it had changed my life so much that I wanted to help everyone. I was dipping my toe in the Trim Healthy coaching, and I had a little tribe here locally, and I did a group session. I was asking them, hey, I'm going to start the coaching. Will you guys be like my guinea pigs? I did in-person coaching with a group of ladies, and it was just so much fun. I was teaching people how to implement the Trim Healthy fuels. We took field trips to Nashville, went to Costco, went to the cafe, and did just all these things. And I was just so excited about the changes. At this point, you know, I've been doing this a couple of years, and my clients are all starting to just see weight loss, and all in this time, I'm stalled. At this point, I'm going up on the scale, and I'm watching these ladies lose like 70, 50, 30 pounds, and I'm just like, what's happening? What's going on? Why is this working so much better for them than it was working for me? I changed some things because you have to tweak as you get older. 

I joined your per/menopause coaching group, and I was tweaking to help my hormones and things like that, and still, the scale just kept creeping up. I could see it in my clothes. I had to get bigger clothes; I was in a tough place. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong and how to fix it! I Incorporated pickle ball, steps, and strength training. My food and supplements were on point, and I was getting my hormones optimized and my thyroid supported. I was doing all the things, and yet the weight kept creeping up, and it was just devastating. 

At that point, I was stalled for six months. I visited my doctor, and I said I don't understand why I'm not losing weight. This does not make sense. He actually recommended GLP1 therapy to me. I didn't know what it was, and the way he recommended it to me made me mad. He thought I should try an appetite suppressant. I wanted to hit him! He had no idea what my diet looked like or how carefully I was tracking my food and making choices. 

Probably about a year of my doctor and others recommending GLP1 therapy. I was in such turmoil after doing a lot of research on these therapies; I just didn't have peace about it for me personally. I just couldn't do it, and I didn't want to accept that my body was broken. I felt like, you know, I was being told my body was broken and it wasn't working, and it wouldn't metabolize fuels, and I so where a lot of people have hope with these therapies, I felt hopeless and defeated. In the end, after many tears, I called and ordered the prescription. I had hit a wall, and the thought of using medication to "fix" my body didn't sit well with me. 

Somewhere at this time, as I continued to research GLP1 therapy, I ran across some information about metabolic numbers like A1C, fasting glucose, and insulin. I thought my numbers were golden at that time because my fasting insulin had dropped from 24 to 7 just by following the Trim Healthy plan for over three years. At this point, nobody had told me I was insulin resistant, even the doctor. Then I came across an endocrinologist on Instagram, and she says that if your fasting insulin number is seven, that's not bad, but under five is optimal and where you want to be to be insulin sensitive. That just clicked; I was like, wait a minute, my number is seven, and you're telling me there's still a problem! I thought I was good and golden, so I just started deep diving at that moment into insulin resistance and going through all the different doctors, influencers, and different people to glean knowledge from. 

I was sure I was doing everything perfectly correctly, but I was still having the effects of insulin resistance. But understanding that there was something I could do to change my trajectory was powerful; I called my doctor and said to cancel my order. And then, I gave myself a month to try to reverse my insulin resistance. So I took my very firm foundation of Trim Healthy, and I started applying different tools and different people's knowledge about what I needed to eat and how to eat if I was insulin resistant. After one week of beginning my new insulin resistance eating plan, which happened to be a PMS week, I lost weight! The following week saw more weight loss, and since September, I have been slowly seeing weight loss. My inflammation has been going away since September. I have lost almost 30 pounds! 

As I researched insulin resistance to tweak my eating plan, I noticed that almost everyone on the GLP1 therapy eats less. This is because the drug mimics their GLP1 hormones, they feel full, and they don't want to eat a lot. I like to eat a lot, so the thought of changing that was a little scary for me. I changed with the help of a food scale, I started weighing my protein to know precisely what 30 grams of protein looked like. I was determined to get 30 grams of protein at every meal and every snack. I didn't want to measure all my food and count everything all the time, so I started prepping my food in little bowls. Looking back at my pictures on Instagram, you'll see a big plate with a bunch of little bowls to keep everything portioned out. I needed a visual of my protein, fat, and carbs and what that looked like on my plate. It took a little while to realize that sometimes I was way overdoing protein. Eating a whole chicken breast is a lot of freaking protein! So, I overate some foods and underate others. 

I also realized I needed to track my blood sugar better, so I tested my blood sugar with a glucose monitor for two weeks to see what foods were causing the issue. If something I was eating was sabotaging me, I needed to know. I found out that there were two big culprits that were taking me down - oatmeal and sweet potatoes. Someday, I might be able to sit down and eat a whole bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, but right now, that spikes my blood sugar. This was a shock because, at the time, I was eating oatmeal for breakfast and sweet potatoes for lunch and dinner. But they were causing me to have a huge blood sugar spike and drop. After I tested my blood sugar and found the foods I was eating regularly were part of my problem, I had to walk away from a few of those foods. So, I've found I need more protein, fat, and smart carbs for my blood sugar.

Next, I began eating non-starchy veggies at every meal and snack and prioritized eating those veggies first. This was a massive game-changer for me. Probably out of everything, I changed, which I did change a lot; the nonstarchy veggies and eating a lot at the beginning of my meal were huge. And I didn't even realize when I started what eating those veggies first was doing for me. The prebiotic fiber was getting into my stomach, and different juices were created to prepare my stomach for digestion. It also tells my GLP1 hormones to get ready, says we're going to slow down, and tells my pancreas how much insulin I will need later on after working through my glucose for a little while and not just jolting it in my system. 

From the moment I woke up I got my fasting blood sugar then I took it before I ate, then an hour after, then two hours after, then right before my next meal, an hour after and two hours after. II just needed some data to find out what was going on so I could create this protocol for myself.

I was going to say about the veggies. It not only filled me up, it also took away the food noise, which I didn't realize that I was constantly thinking about. Once the food noise was quieted, I became aware of my constant desire to put something in my mouth. I just felt undisciplined, I just thought that was willpower. Ever since I was 10 years old, I thought that thinking about food all the time was normal. I didn't know people actually ate a meal and didn't think about food again till it was time for their next meal. I had no clue that this was a reality! But that is another benefit of stimulating my natural GLP1 hormones.  

About the time I started figuring out these new strategies I had to start with a series of oral surgeries which meant I would be on soft foods for several months. My dentist was telling me I needed to eat foods like mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and all this stuff full of simple carbs. I was like, we're going to have to think of something different because I can't do those foods.  I finally got to the place where I was eating all these vegetables, even though I didn't like raw vegetables a lot when I started. I liked salads but when I saw raw veggie plates, I was always like - why do people eat that, you need to cook those vegetables.