Jeremiah Farias (00:00.046)
Do you have diabetes and you’ve been told you need to lose weight in order to see improvements in your blood sugar and reverse your diabetes? However, your efforts to lose weight have not worked or you initially made progress but found yourself gaining the weight back and sometimes even gaining more weight than before. In today’s video, I’ll review why this is and what we can start doing to lose weight, specifically body fat, keep it off while improving our blood sugar metabolism and overall health.

Hi, my name is Jeremiah Farias. I’m a functional registered dietitian and I help adults suffering from blood sugar dysregulation issues, conditions like pre -diabetes and diabetes, using a bio -energetic approach to support cellular energy production. I dive into the science and mechanisms involved in improving health and blood sugar metabolism while also providing you with practical takeaways. I hope you enjoy today’s content. When it comes to losing fat and improving body composition, calories do matter.

However, I’m not here to simply tell you that eating less and moving more is going to improve all of your issues. You are probably already doing that and you’ve likely been doing that for a while now. Instead, I’m gonna explain how diabetes and weight loss resistance are connected and how we can address both. First, as a reminder, type 2 diabetes is a state where the body cannot use or oxidize glucose in the cell. Glucose can enter into the cell, but for a number of reasons, the glucose cannot be turned into energy or ATP.

Weight loss resistance can be a similar issue. Many I work with have done a variety of diets over the years. Many of their experiences end up being the same. They reduce calories by cutting carbohydrates or fats, or they reduce their portions, therefore reducing their calorie intake. This initially results in weight loss. However, unless someone is ensuring sufficient amounts of protein and doing resistance training, anywhere from 20 to 30 % of that weight loss is gonna come from fat -free mass, which includes muscle tissue. And this is less than ideal.

For those who have reached their goal weight, they find themselves needing to restrict their calories or keep it very low in order to maintain their new weight. Or if they don’t, they’ll end up gaining that weight back fairly quickly. Others who still have weight to lose can see their weight loss beginning to slow down or stop altogether. The next logical step is increasing exercise to burn more calories or decreasing calories a bit. Sometimes people end up doing both at the same time. As a result, they end up in a severe caloric deficit.

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Some continue to lose weight, yet they feel awful and start experiencing other health issues. Other times, their weight is not decreasing while also experiencing health issues. Some of these health issues can include hair loss, hormonal imbalances, low energy, brittle hair and nails, sensitivity to cold or cold hands and feet, and poor stress tolerance. This is happening because they’ve lowered their body’s metabolic rate and are in a low energy state.

The body is intuitive and adaptive. If you only give it a thousand calories per day, it adjusts to using only 1000 calories per day. However, if your body requires close to 2000 calories per day to maintain your weight and provide sufficient energy to the numerous systems of your body, yet you’re only giving it a thousand calories per day to work with, this is going to lead to a lot of chronic health conditions. This chronic undernourishment of the body is a stressor and you’re going to see elevations in baseline cortisol. This is going to impair cellular energy production,

lower the metabolic rate and thyroid function. Ultimately, poor cellular energy production can impair your efforts to lose fat and worsen blood sugar control. This is how you can be eating very little food or carbohydrates and still have diabetes. This is why I argue for eating enough calories coming from whole foods. So having balanced meals with sufficient high quality protein, whole food carbohydrates, healthy fats,

and some non -starchy vegetables. This way you’re optimizing your overall health while improving your body composition and blood sugar metabolism. Your approach to losing weight and improving blood sugar levels should not worsen other areas of your health. In a moment, we’ll talk about how to know if you’re meeting your body’s nutrient needs, both macronutrient and micronutrient needs, and how doing so is going to improve body composition, allow you to lose weight,

and also allow you to improve your blood sugar health. Before we dive into that, I’m curious, is the situation that I’ve described something you personally experienced or you’ve observed in others? Or have you run into other challenges when it comes to losing weight or improving your blood sugar health? Let me know in the comments. If you’re enjoying this video, please be sure to hit that like button. If you’re looking for practical information that you can begin applying today to start improving your blood sugar metabolism and overall health, you’ll want to get my free guides. They include five steps to improving your blood sugar metabolism and my macronutrient guide.

Jeremiah Farias (04:18.541)
My macronutrient guide reviews the ideal sources of protein, carbohydrates, and fats that are going to help optimize cellular energy production. You can find the link for both of those in the description. Let’s figure out if you’re eating enough, and if not, how to start doing so. We will start by calculating your estimated caloric needs. This is not perfect as our bodies are complex, but this is a great starting place. I’ll discuss where to go from here, depending on where you’re at. We’re gonna start by using this free online calculator to calculate something called BMR, which stands for Basal Metabolic Rate.

So for the sake of this example, we’re going to use a 45 year old female who is 5 ‘5″, 65 inches tall and weighs about 145 pounds. I’ll expand using this settings button, selecting calories, and we’re going to use the Mifflin’s Angiore equation. You’ll see if you have your body fat percentage, you got an in -body done, or you just have a good…

estimate of your body fat percentage. Feel free to use the catch mcardle. It’s going to be more precise, but this example will just stick with the mectylin change. You’re going to press calculate. It will calculate our estimated needs and it’s going to give you first that BMR of 13 ,004 calories. The basal metabolic rate is the amount of energy that your body requires if you were bed bound. And so most people are not in fact bed bound. So we’re going to go down to the, our, our activity level in this example, we’ll just say,

We are exercising, or this female is exercising four to five times per week. That means their estimated needs are 1 ,910 calories per day. This is the place that we can start, and we’re gonna return to this number in a little bit. Next, we’ll wanna have an idea of how many calories you’re currently eating. If you’re someone who is presently tracking, that’s gonna make this process a lot easier. If you haven’t been, no worries. We’ll talk about how to go about doing that. I recommend using an app called Chronometer, not sponsored by them.

but I find that the database that they use is much more accurate than a lot of other common food trackers when it comes to the micronutrients and macronutrients that foods provide. And when it comes to tracking calories, we wanna track for around a week, especially if what you eat varies a lot day to day. If you eat very similar foods from day to day, then you’d probably get away with around three to four days, and that will be an accurate representation of what your meal and your calories look like.

Jeremiah Farias (06:37.998)
In this example, I’ll use one day though. As you can see, on this day, this person ate close to around 1100 calories. And we’re gonna assume that this is an accurate representation of what this individual’s week also looks like for the rest of their meals. And as a reminder, we’re going based off the woman, the 45 year old female who is 5 ‘5 and weighs 145 pounds. If you remember, this person’s estimated needs are around 1910 calories.

This is a difference of over 800 calories per day. Because of this huge difference between this person’s caloric intake versus their caloric needs, I recommend slowly increasing calories close to 1910 per day. You would do this again slowly. And this means increasing calories by around 100 calories per week. How should we go about increasing calories? This is going to depend on the person’s current macronutrient intake. I often start by optimizing protein intake to help increase calories.

Once protein intake is optimized, we can begin adding calories from carbohydrates and fats. And if you want to learn how much protein you should be eating, I’ll link to a video above that you can check out after. It is really important to know as we’re increasing calories that we’re focusing on incorporating ideal sources of all the macronutrients. If you increase calories in general from the wrong foods, this is not going to have the effect that you’re looking for. As you increase calories each week, you want to monitor…

what changes to body composition are occurring. You can use your weight on the scale, you can even take measurements, or assess how clothes are fitting from week to week. If you’re gaining weight, slow down. You might wanna increase calories by 50 per week instead of 100.

Everybody’s gonna be different and some people require more time to up -regulate metabolic processes. You wanna increase calories as much as possible, right up to the point where your weight slightly increases. This is the most accurate way to establish your maintenance calories. This is how many calories your body requires to optimize your health and meet your nutrient needs. Many people I work with maintain their weight during this process and some even lose weight as they’re increasing their calories. Other important factors to consider while you’re increasing your calories,

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is your calorie and meal distribution, managing stress, optimizing and getting enough sleep, doing sufficient movement or exercise. When you figure out your estimated caloric needs, you wanna evenly distribute those calories across three to four meals, so having a sufficient amount of protein, carbohydrates, fats at each meal. If you have other health issues outside of blood sugar, staying at maintenance calories for a while until some of these issues begin to resolve is recommended. Your body has likely been in a stressed, low energy state for a while.

Giving it the raw materials that it needs will result in better health in the long run. This includes improving body composition and blood sugar control. Finally, after a period of being consistent with meeting your body’s energy demands and you’re feeling great, you can start to then slowly decrease calories. You wanna monitor the changes that are occurring with your body composition and make small adjustments based on your progress. I know this can be a lot to consider and this is why I work with people to help them simplify the process.

we create small, actionable steps that are working us slowly towards that ideal. I often have people make changes without going to this degree of detail and only have them track at a certain point. If you’re tired of starving yourself and avoiding carbohydrates to lose weight and improve your blood sugar, you can schedule a free 30 minute discovery call that I offer to learn more about working with me. I will help you get to the root of your blood sugar issues, improve your body composition while optimizing your overall health. The link will be in the description. As I mentioned earlier in this video,

I often have people start by prioritizing their protein intake when they’re trying to improve blood sugar and their overall health. This is why I created two videos that review the topic of protein as it relates to diabetes. The first compares animal proteins to plant proteins and the other is going to share how much protein you should be aiming for to optimize your health and blood sugar. I’ll link to both of those at the end. If you enjoyed today’s video, please be sure to hit that like button, subscribe and turn on notifications so you don’t miss any future videos. Take care and I’ll see you next week.