How to Eat More Without Gaining Weight After 40

Nikkiey: I was told that I needed to reverse out of my low-calorie eating for so many months, and I didn't listen, and I gained 25 pounds back in one month. After being told, too, that eating less is always the answer, and the narratives that a lot of women have in their brain from the years of dieting and the marketing and the history, it's the story we hold on to, but it's not actually facts. I say that because when you hear that all the time, eating more feels like it goes against everything that you've learned.

Hey, hey, hey. What's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of The WarriorBabe Show with your host, Nikkiey Stott. Today's episode is for the woman, and the many women I have told this to, who has been told to eat more and is absolutely terrified to do it. Maybe you've been in a caloric deficit for a really long time. Maybe you're eating far less than you think a woman your size should need, and you know that you need to eat more, but you're having these feelings of fear.

And maybe somebody like me has told you the answer is to eat more, and that'll help you get to where you want to be. And you can't help but have those thoughts like, yeah, sure, I hear you, but I'm going to gain 10, 20 pounds. I totally understand that fear, especially because when I came out of bodybuilding after my first show, I was told that I needed to reverse out of my low-calorie eating for so many months, and I didn't listen, and I gained 25 pounds back in one month.

And it was painful, physically and mentally. So I totally get that fear. And after being told that eating less is always the answer, and the narratives that a lot of women have in their brain from the years of dieting and the marketing and the history of mom doing diets, eating less, there's this narrative that we hold on to that we think is true. It's the story we hold on to, but it's not actually facts. I say that because when you hear that all the time, eating more feels like it goes against everything that you've learned.

So my hope for today's episode is to give you a playbook, not just the reason, but the steps, week by week, so that you know exactly what to do, what to watch for, and when to just pause and hold, with the science behind why eating more works and how to execute on it. If you go back to episodes I've done on this topic before, on quote-unquote reverse dieting, eating more to lose fat, this episode is about how to put it tactically into play.

I've talked about it, and I've definitely given you tactical tips in previous episodes, but this was such a hot topic and one I've been asked many times to re-record. So I'm bringing this one back so you have this playbook to refer to, either as you're going into the holiday season or coming out of it into the new year, depending on where you're at in your journey. But first, I want to set an honest expectation, because it'll save you a lot of panic.

Eating more without gaining weight doesn't mean the scale never moves. It means that we raise your calories slowly enough that your body can use the extra food through higher energy, better training and a more active metabolism instead of storing it. So you may see a small bump on the scale at the start. Often a couple of pounds is okay.

You may see it anywhere from three pounds, give or take, and everybody is drastically different in this experience. But I want to set the expectation that that's usually water and glycogen. More food, especially more carbohydrates, means that your muscles store more glycogen, and glycogen holds onto water. That's not fat. That is your body being fueled again. That's your body saying it's actually working. So I don't want you to fret if you see this happening on the scale, because you're using a measurement tool to see your progress.

It actually means it's working. It's your body saying, thank you for finally fueling and feeding me again. So what we're aiming for is a trend, not a single weigh-in where you see yourself gain five pounds. We're watching averages over the week. If you remember one thing from this section: one morning on the scale tells you almost nothing. Please drill that into your head. The two-week average tells you what is real.

If you are measuring yourself every single day and you've seen a trend going down over the two weeks, that means it's working. You may have spikes in that trend. It may go up, down, up, down. But as long as your trend is going down, you're making progress, and vice versa, okay? So step one of this tactical playbook is finding your real starting point. You can't raise your calories from a number that you're guessing.

So many women say, well, Nikkiey, I eat healthy and I make healthy choices throughout the day. Yeah, you do. That's awesome. You probably choose quality food, but do you know how much you're actually consuming? So step one is to track honestly for at least seven days, or 10 days, or 14 days, without changing anything. Without saying, oh, I'm focusing on being better at my eating habits,

so I'm going to track better. No. Be honest. Be real. Track what you would normally be eating, because it's a more realistic depiction of what you are consuming. And I would do that every day, and I would do it on weekends too. And I would track the sauces and the oils and the bites, licks and tastes, we call them the BLTs, and the handful of nuts and the coffee creamer. Weigh your food when you can. I'm going to get pushback on that, but you can't advance forward in a scientific manner with macronutrients without trying new things that you're not doing right now.

So you're going to have to weigh your food. I'm not asking you to weigh your food for the rest of your life, but you're going to have to at the start. And if you've been tracking using MyFitnessPal, you have to track it and pay attention to it. You've got to know where the gaps hide. At the end, take your average daily calories and your average daily protein. That's your starting line. Sometimes I've seen women logging, say, 800 calories one day,

then 1,200 calories, then 1,800, then down to 1,100. So let's use 1,500 calories as the average. Write down that baseline number, because you're going to compare against it later. Also pay attention to your average weight over those two weeks, your waist and hip measurements, how you feel, your energy, sleep, hunger, mood and how your training is going. These are all important baselines. Do not skip these baseline fundamentals. They're what let you see progress later on, because the scale alone is just going to confuse you.

With the scale alone, you will throw out this type of plan, or you will give up before you actually allow the plan to start working. The plan could actually be working, and you may give up because of the number on the scale. I'm telling you that because I've seen so many women do that so many times. The second step is to lock in your protein. Before we add a single calorie, before we add 50 or 100 calories, or focus on your fats and your carbs, we've got to fix protein. Because I know the majority of women entering the WarriorBabe ecosystem

or starting their journey are only consuming about 65 to 70 grams a day. So we've got to fix that. Your goal protein intake should be your goal body weight in grams of protein a day. So one gram per pound of your goal body weight, across all your meals. Not, say, 150 grams in each meal; I mean that divided by four or five meals in your day. And you've got to have protein at breakfast, not just at dinner. Many women find that simply raising their protein steadies their hunger.

It raises their energy. And that is the right foundation before we focus on implementing anything else. It's so important to do this strategically and in this order, because if we were to increase calories and start adding in carbs first, we'd be getting ahead of ourselves rather than taking these first easy steps. And that's what they are: very easy steps before we advance to other variables. As you are reversing and adding more food into your plan, this protein stays the same throughout the whole reverse.

It doesn't go down as calories go up. It's the anchor. Before step three, you've got to allow this increase in protein to take place over a 7 to 14 day time frame. You've got to be consistent with it. I don't mean perfect, but consistent. So 80% of your week, you've got to be nailing this protein intake on a daily basis.

Then, as your body adjusts and gets used to the protein intake, you can move to step three: add in calories slowly. That can come from carbs or fats, but I'll probably add carbs first. This is the heart of the playbook. This is so important, you guys. A common starting guideline is to add about 50 to 100 calories per week. Let your mind soak that in, because in retrospect it's not a lot of food.

It may sound like a lot to you right now, because so many people are daunted by numbers and by eating more. I hear you and I understand that, but having seen so many women trust this process and their outcome on the other side of it, I'm reaching my hand back to you right now and saying, I got you. Trust me now, believe me later. I'll see you on the other side of this. Some women do better closer to 50, especially if they've been eating very low for a really long time or tend to be sensitive to change.

Some can handle a bit more. So think of this as a range, not a rule. The right place depends uniquely on you. And this is what we dive into inside WarriorBabe and one-on-one coaching: having somebody in your corner telling you what to do so you just have to execute. You don't have to guess. If that's something you're interested in, check out warriorbabe.com, go to our coaching and apply. That way there's someone in your corner telling you how to do this, and you're just executing.

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The calories mostly come from carbohydrates with a little bit of fat. And I know I'm broadly speaking to you guys, and I can hear some of you saying, well, I'm insulin resistant, or I'm diabetic, and carbs, X, Y, Z. I'm speaking to the general population of women here.

If you are insulin resistant, there is still a way to incorporate carbs that your body will handle, and you have to pair them with protein. If you have protein with a carb, your body is going to lessen the spike in your blood glucose during that meal. Now, back to the carbs. They're going to give you energy for training and recovery. And they're what many women have been cutting the hardest. In practice, this is small.

Fifty calories is about one extra serving of fruit or a bit more rice or oats. The tiniest bit. A hundred calories is just a slice of bread. I want to put that into perspective, because a hundred calories can seem like so much, but when you see what a hundred calories actually is, hopefully you won't have so much fear around it. You're not eating a mountain of food. You're adding one small thing, and then you stay there.

You stay at that 50 or 100 calories for a week or two weeks. And at the end of each week, you check in. How is my energy? How are my pictures? How's my weight? How is my sleep? How are all of these biometrics and the feedback in my body responding? Again, this is something a coach can do for you, but I'm also giving you the juice on how to do it yourself. That brings me to the next step: the weekly check-in. Once a week, you look at five things.

You don't just look at the scale. You look at your average weight for the week compared to the week before. You look at your measurements every two weeks. You assess your strength in the gym. You take notes on your biofeedback: your hunger, energy, sleep and how your training feels. Here are the decision rules. If your average weight is stable or rising only slightly and you feel good, add the next small increase. That could be another 50 or another 100 calories.

And even if you're up 100 calories over the course of two or three weeks, that's only a couple of slices of bread. This is the most important thing I want you to take away: you're allowing your body to adapt in this process, which is so important, with consistency along the way. If your weight is trending up and climbs faster than you'd expect for two weeks in a row, then I would just hold. Hold your calories where they are for another week or two, because this is where

you just need your body to adapt a little more, and everybody's different. Or maybe you weren't consistent. If you weren't consistent, do not jump up another 100 calories. Hold it, get consistent, and once you're consistent and you've seen good trends across all of the data points I just mentioned, then you can increase again. But at that stage, if you see your weight going up...

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Don't panic. Don't cut. Don't slash your calories. Don't go kill yourself doing more cardio. Just pause and let your body catch up.

I want you to know that holding is not you failing. It's literally part of the process. Now, if your hunger drops, your energy rises and your training gets stronger, that is a great sign. It tells you your body is responding to this food intake. If your weight jumps one day, please just ignore it. Look at the average, not the day. Okay. That's the loop: you add a little, you hold, you check, you repeat.

You add a little, you hold, you check, you repeat. You see how this is a process. I've seen women go through this reverse over the course of nine to 12 months because they have to undo the dieting they've done for the last 20 years. Now, the next step, step five: don't pull back on your training when you're raising your calories. You have to be doing strength training, because it is what tells your body

where the extra fuel should go. It signals that the muscle is needed and that your body needs to hold on to that muscle tissue. It should be kept, it needs to be built and it needs to be recovered. So keep the heavy lifting with progressive overload three to four days a week. Take the time off for recovery and let it do its job. Women who keep training through a reverse tend to feel so much stronger quickly, and that's often the first sign that this is working, long before the mirror

starts to change. Now, step six is knowing when you've arrived and thinking about what comes next. All of those steps I just described, add a little, hold, check, repeat, could go on for nine months, or four months, or five months. It depends drastically on you as an individual, the diet history you have, the metabolic

stress you've been under, X, Y and Z. And that all gets determined in a conversation you have with our team. Somebody actually sits down with you, is curious about your struggles, your setbacks, your diet history, what's been holding you back and where you want to go, and you're able to understand how to flip what you've been doing to get on the right course to where you want to go. And first of all, I do a live training.

We do it weekly, we talk about all of this and more, and we help you set the foundations with nutrition and strength training. That link is in the description below, or you can skip the training and talk directly with the team, and that link is below as well. But anyway, step six: once you do the raise a little, hold, rinse and repeat over and over again, you allow your body to adapt, and you're probably going to see some amazing progress. You're going to be eating more food and saying, whoa, I'm eating 600 more calories than I was six months

ago, but I'm losing weight. I'm getting more toned. Ideally, the goal here is to get you up to your maintenance. So how do you know you've reached it? Your weight average holds steady while your calories sit at a higher level than where you started. Your energy is good. Your hunger is manageable. And your training is strong. At that point, you've done something very, very valuable for your metabolism and your body. You've built a higher calorie ceiling and a more responsive metabolism.

So when you later decide to go into a fat loss phase, you'll be starting from a much better place, with more room to work with going into a calorie deficit and less restriction needed. So many women come into our program having only been eating 800 calories. You can't cut at 800 calories, because you won't get anywhere in six months. That's why everything I'm talking about in this episode needs to be implemented in your journey: to get your metabolism to a responsive

state with a higher calorie ceiling. So that once your body adapts to that number, when you do go into a deficit and drop a hundred calories, and another hundred, you have some room to work with. Now, some women stay in maintenance for a while, they love it and enjoy it, and they see some real body composition changes. Some women move into a building phase to build more muscle. Some go into a measured fat loss phase. That's a decision I could dive into in a whole other episode, but it's so unique

to you individually and what you need. The reverse is what makes any of those choices work so much better. As we wrap this up, I'm going to go over it again in order, really quickly. Step one: find your real starting point. You've got to know where you're at and be realistic about it, so you've got to track and weigh your food. Then you lock in your protein. You know the average protein you've been consuming daily; how can you get that closer to one gram per pound of your goal body weight?

Then you allow your body to adapt to that over seven to 14 days, and after that you start adding calories slowly, mostly carbs and a little bit of fat. Then you check in weekly with yourself. You look at your average weight, your measurements, your energy, your sleep and how your training feels. If you're good, go up. If your weight is trending up more than you'd like for two weeks, then

hold. And it's this loop: you add a little, you hold, you check, you repeat, okay? And you keep lifting the entire time. And you know you've arrived when you're eating at a higher calorie ceiling and you've seen some progress with your body composition, okay? One caution I need to add here. If you have a history of disordered eating, or you have a medical condition, or this process

brings up a lot of fear and anxiety around food, please don't do this alone. Please, please, please work with a professional who can support you in this process. Go check out warriorbabe.com and work with one of our expert coaches. This playbook is just a guide. It is not a replacement for individual care if this is something you struggle with or have a history of. Now, that's the whole playbook in 20 minutes, okay? Pay attention to those steps.

Lock in those steps. Once you do this, you build a foundation that every other phase works better on. Plus, your metabolism has now adapted to a higher calorie intake, and that's why you're going to win in everything moving forward with your body composition changes. I've literally seen it in thousands of women inside WarriorBabe. If you want to see WarriorBabe success stories and women saying, I can't believe I'm eating 600 more calories, or a thousand more calories, or I'm eating 2,500 calories and I'm 58 years old, go to warriorbabe.com, check out the success stories and go to the client interviews,

because there are so many good ones in there. Overall, you don't have to be afraid of food. You just need a plan and some patience. And the slow approach isn't just a cautious approach. It's one that actually works. So I don't want you thinking, oh my gosh, this is so slow and it's taking forever. It's slow because it actually works. All right, guys. And I'm going to remind you about the live training. If you want to put this into practice and learn even more of this stuff for free, we do trainings weekly.

The registration link is below, so go register and check it out. It's free. If you have a free 7 p.m. at night, check it out and sit in on it, and see what you think. All right. I love you guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.

Hey, really quick before you go, I have one small favor to ask. If this episode brought you value or sparked something in you, take a moment to hit that review button. Your rating and review make all the difference in helping more women discover the tools they need to transform their fitness and their confidence. It takes less than a minute, but it can change the path of someone else's journey. Thank you so much for leaving that review. I appreciate you so much.