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Summary
On episode 72 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan answers a listener question from Kelly, a 49 year old former CrossFitter who trained hard for four years but couldn't figure out why the fat loss stalled.
Allan digs into two details Kelly shared after her question came in: she has metabolic syndrome, and she was eating a low carb, high protein diet around 1,000 calories a day. Both turn out to matter a lot.
He breaks down why weight training helps with fat loss only indirectly, why CrossFit's metabolic conditioning work can quietly sabotage the goal, and what he recommended Kelly change.
Links
- https://40plusfitness.com
Key Takeaways
- Fat loss comes from what and how much you eat, not from the workout itself. Lifting weights should be done for strength or to maintain muscle mass, not treated as the primary tool for losing fat, because relying on exercise alone invites self-sabotage through “earned” extra food.
- Metabolically demanding workouts like CrossFit's Metcons tend to spike hunger afterward. Allan experienced this himself over a year and a half of CrossFit: he got stronger from the lifts but never lost fat, because the conditioning work made him significantly hungrier.
- Kelly's metabolic syndrome means her body overproduces insulin, which drives constant fat storage. That creates a cycle of being hungry, eating more, and storing more fat that is hard to break out of without addressing insulin directly.
- Eating more protein than the body needs to rebuild muscle gets converted to blood sugar. That blood sugar spike triggers an insulin spike, which then gets stored as fat, so a low carb, high protein diet can backfire if the protein portion is too high.
- The fix for excess protein is swapping in healthy fats. Fish, grass-fed beef, avocados, nuts, coconut, pasture-raised eggs, and grass-fed butter provide the building blocks for hormones, which matters directly for someone whose hormones are already out of balance from insulin resistance.
- A little more muscle raises metabolism only slightly day to day, but it compounds. Allan compares it to being just 1 percent off course walking the equator: over a long enough distance, that small margin adds up to hundreds of miles.
- Strength and endurance training tends to increase activity outside the gym too. People who train seriously also tend to pay closer attention to what they eat, tracking macros and energy levels simply because they're already tuned into their bodies.
- Allan's recommendation for Kelly: keep the swimming and walking, drop the Metcons, and add back one full body compound lifting session. He suggested 3 to 8 reps per set at 50 to 90 percent of her one rep max to build strength and preserve muscle, with a trainer to check her Olympic lifting form since that style of lifting is unforgiving of technique errors.
“Fat loss comes from what and how much you eat.”
Coach Allan
