How does walking support your fat loss goals, support muscle and bone density and give you so many other health benefits at the same time? And where does that fit in with our cardio, cortisol levels and changing hormones when we get into our 40’s and beyond? Today I’m taking a deeper dive into how our resting metabolic rate is influenced by our body composition, how we burn energy and lose body fat, the strategies around muscle preservation, and why this all matters as we age.
In this episode I’m exploring…
⭐️ How your body composition impacts your resting metabolic rate
⭐️ How our muscle tissue impacts our ability to lose body fat
⭐️ Reviewing the key training strategies that support body composition results
⭐️ Why many women start gaining more body fat in their 40’s (and how to address it)
⭐️ How your body burns energy: TDEE, TEF, EAT and NEAT explained
⭐️ How walking more supports fat loss and preserves muscle and bone density
⭐️ Why we need to vary our approach slightly at different times in our lives
Links to follow up from this episode:
- Links for the walking pads I use and like
- Shifting the muscle to fat ratio: women-specific body composition considerations
- Perimenopause Training and Eating Guide
- Postmenopause Training and Eating Guide
- Betty Rocker balanced healthy eating programs
- Betty Rocker challenges (with custom options for women in peri and postmenopause)
Episode Transcript
New TabBetty Rocker (00:16):
What’s up, rock stars Coach Betty Rocker here. Hey, thanks so much for taking the time to hang out with me today and listen to the podcast. So we recently had a conversation about some of the health benefits of walking and how it’s just so beneficial for our health and has a profound impact on lowering nearly all causes of mortality. Plus it supports our bones and joints, helps us burn body fat and totally improves our mood. Now, there was a lot we covered in that episode, but one thing I don’t think we’ve talked about enough is why walking and moving around more throughout your day in general is really such an easy key to fat loss. A large amount of our daily energy burn and fat loss actually comes from our regular casual movement, not our workouts alone and just how much of this residual movement and things like walking have the potential to contribute to fat loss is influenced by our metabolic rate and that is actually impacted by how much muscle tissue we have.
(01:19)
This is one of the many reasons I’m always talking about strengthening our muscle tissue and preserving it at every age, especially as we get into our forties and beyond and our hormone levels start to change, which makes it easier for us to lose our muscle tissue. So the more we can shift our focus towards strengthening and preserving that muscle tissue and understand why that’s so beneficial to us, the better protected we are in so many ways as we go through time. Now, one of the key reasons to focus on your muscle tissue if you are at all concerned about maintaining your fat loss or losing body fat right now, is that the more muscle tissue you have, the more efficiently you burn energy or calories even at rest, which means you’ll more easily lose body fat and keep your body fat level lower if you have more muscle tissue.
(02:10)
And I’m gonna explain why here in more depth muscle is a pretty cool body tissue for so many reasons, but I bring it up and focus on it because so often we get really fixated on fat loss and there often seems to be a lot of focus on cardio and fat loss because of the focus on calorie burn and how that’s always so equated with weight loss. But I think this kind of approach really does us a disservice as women because it’s not the entire story. And unless we understand what’s going on beneath our skin, this overfocus on weight loss and under focus on our muscle tissue starts to really impact us in our midlife years creating more burnout out then burn fat. Now when I say muscle, you might immediately think of a bodybuilder