Living A Full Life

Burn Fat, Keep Muscle

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 1

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Tired of white-knuckling your diet while the scale won’t budge? We pull back the curtain on the biology that fights fast weight loss and lay out a clear plan to burn fat, keep muscle, and protect your metabolism—without gimmicks or endless cardio. From adaptive thermogenesis to smart refeeds, you’ll learn how to work with your body, not against it.

We start by showing why crash dieting and extreme cardio backfire, teaching your system to conserve energy and crank up hunger. Then we build the foundation: lift three to five times per week to preserve lean mass, hit about one gram of protein per pound of body weight, and raise non-exercise activity with simple daily movement. You’ll get practical macro math, a step-by-step way to set a modest deficit, and a straightforward method to phase cuts with maintenance so your resting metabolic rate doesn’t tank.

Hormones get real attention here. We cover insulin’s role in fat storage, cortisol’s link to stubborn belly fat, why poor sleep wrecks appetite signals, and how testosterone and estrogen imbalances can slow results. We share stress management and sleep tactics that help flip your physiology toward fat loss, plus how refeeds and reverse dieting restore leptin, motivation, and training performance. Along the way, we flag common traps—“30 pounds in 30 days,” cardio-only plans, and year-round deficits—that create plateaus and rebound.

If you want sustainable results, track behaviors that matter: protein servings, steps, sleep, and strength, not just the number on the scale. Expect slow, steady change—about a pound a week—while clothes fit better and workouts get stronger. Ready to build a body that naturally burns fat at rest? Follow, share with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a quick review to tell us which habit you’re starting today.

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Last week we talked about GLP1 medications like Ozempic and semiglutide, how they work and their risks. This week we're taking it back to the basics. How to achieve real lasting fat loss without relying on drugs. We'll unpack metabolism, hormones, muscle, sleep, and mindset, the things that actually determine whether you keep weight off for good. Thanks for joining us for another week of Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Dolce Corey. Why is weight loss so hard? I don't hear very many 24-year-olds saying that, but I do hear a lot of 44-year-olds and 64-year-olds saying that. And it's for multiple reasons. Your mind, your body's primary job is survival, not aesthetics. And the world has become comfortable over the last hundred years. I mean, it's very different than what it was 300 years ago. Life was tough. You had to grind, you had to sow your fields, you had to get your own food, or you'd starve. I mean, it's a very different world. It's comfortable, and that comfort has made us more think about vanity more often, about how we look, and it's more aesthetic than it is survival. Not very hard to survive anymore. If you need food, you can go to a food bank, you can get it, right? Um, but from an aesthetic perspective, we're all on top of it. So when you lose weight quickly, the body adapts by slowing your metabolism right away. It's a survival mechanism and increasing hunger hormones like ghrelin, it makes you hungrier. That's why when you go on a diet, you get hungry. Uh, it's a survival mechanism. And unfortunately, with yo-yo dieting and always trying to lose weight, we suppress calories over a longer period of time, rising hormones in the body, stress hormones, cortisol, ghrelin, all these other things that make us hungry and angry. And it's why it's a losing battle. It's because we get angry, we get uh tough to be with, tough to work with, and we get tired and we're just grumpy, and we're just not meant for it because we're designed for survival, not aesthetics. So 95% of dieters regain weight because they trigger adaptive thermogenesis, a defense mechanism that lowers resting metabolic rate. So instead of going to bed at night, staying at the same resting metabolic rate and continue to probably burn a little bit of fat, we lower it and we stop that process. So quick fixes like crash diets, extreme cardio, they work short term, but they teach your body to conserve energy. And think about it. When did you start doing that? Starts for a lot of people at a young age in their teens. In their teens, if they've got extra weight going into their teenage years, they become self-conscious because of aesthetics, because of society. And they'll start doing things like that. They'll take up working out, they'll take up track and field, they'll start running, and they'll short term elevate their metabolic rate and their body's like, what's going on? Why are we working so hard all of a sudden? And then they'll stop for a while because life gets stressful. SATs, getting into college, get to college, and then you're in college, you got into the program you want, you're back in the gym doing something crazy again, or a diet. Starts young if you think about it. And as we as the decades go by, you've retrained your metabolism to a point where it's like, this person's crazy. We are gonna reserve energy because we just don't want to burn anything. We don't know when the next psychosis is gonna happen, where they're gonna join freaking CrossFit and lose their minds. So your metabolism's like, that's it. We're staying now at a low basal metabolic rate to just deal with this person. And that's how it works. Kind of sounds like some of your marriages, huh? But the quick fix is just don't. So if your weight loss plan makes your body think you're starving, your biology will fight you, not help you. And then we just train that as the years go by. So if you wonder why you are where you are, the number one thing is probably that. Now, if you haven't been a yo-yo dieter person or a crazy workout person, then you may have some legitimate metabolic things that we can talk about. Metabolic adaptation, and what really happens is that the resting metabolic rate called the RMR, typically in personal training, can drop by 10 to 25% during prolonged caloric restrictions. So if we start eating a low calorie diet for too long, we will just naturally decrease our RMR. Not good in the long term. That's why when we do our weight loss programs, we go at six weeks at a time. It's on purpose. It gives the body rapid weight loss, maximum weight loss in a short amount of time, people are happy, and then resets it for them so that they never get into that prolonged, decreased RMR. Muscle loss over time further lowers metabolism. Muscle is metabolically expensive tissue. And if you lose some of it, you're losing some of your basal metabolic rate. This is what's happening with Lozempic with muscle loss. People are losing the weight, but they're losing a lot of muscle. So when they stop the drug or they plateau, they wonder why they can't lose any more weight. It's because you've lost too much muscle mass. Your basal metabolic rate is so low that even the low calories that you're eating isn't meeting, is still more than what your basal metabolic needs. It's it's crazy. So the thyroid may downregulate, so promote less T3 conversion, cortisol often rises, and leptin falls, all driving fatigue and hunger. It's a negative feedback loop. So weight loss should be slow and supportive to keep metabolism healthy. So, how do we build a fat burning machine? That's the thing of the podcast. How do we do that? No matter what your age is: 72, 55, 41, 30. Doesn't matter. It follows the same rules. The goal isn't just to lose weight, it's to lose fat while keeping muscle. We have to remember that. Resistance training three to five times a week is essential. It signals the body to hold muscle during a deficit. Protein intake, one gram per pound of your current body weight. You have to to maintain that lean muscle. No excessive activity or thermogenesis, um, or non sorry, non-exercise activity, thermogenesis. It's called neat. Walking, standing, moving more outside, the gym can burn hundreds of calories daily as well. So that's the 10,000-step goal. I like that one. You don't speed up metabolism by eating less. Please remember that. You speed it up by doing more with more muscle. That's your metabolism. And unfortunately, we're looking at it the wrong way. So hormones and fat loss, what ends up happening? Insulin controls fat storage, stabilized by balanced meals, fewer ultra-processed carbs, and better meal timing. Cortisol, chronic stress equals more abdominal fat storage. Can't harp about this enough. I'm victim of this as well. My cortisol spikes with stress, and it's just it's it's a hard one to just mentally downregulate the nervous system around stress to help our hormone system. And it's insurmountable. If you have high cortisol, you can do everything eat well, low calorie, work out a lot, which ends up hurting your makes your cortisol worse. Try, but if the stress doesn't change and we adapt to stress in a physiological way, your cortisol is going to go up and you're not, you're not going to burn fat at all. It literally tells your body to not do not burn fat right now. So all you're doing is working out, breaking down muscle, um, and then at night trying to regenerate that muscle. And hopefully you're turning that at a point that maintains it and doesn't lose it. So if your scale's not going down and you're working out and you're eating well, you know, deficit, 300 calorie deficit, 400 calorie deficit, 500 calorie deficit, whatever. You found your uh base metabolic rate, your calories, and you're down 400 calories a day, and you're like, I'm dude, I'm doing everything ChatGPT's telling me, and it's not happening, but you're maintaining your muscle or your weight, it's because you're maintaining your muscle mass. So it's not a complete fail. You're getting stronger, you're building endurance, you're maintaining muscle mass. And if you're eating one gram of protein, should be gaining a little bit more. What I would recommend is increasing your protein a little bit, forget the calorie deficit and just add a few more 100 calories or 200 calories and see what happens to the scale. It should continue to not move, or which means you're putting on muscle, or start to go down a little bit, which is exactly what you want each and every week. One pound, one pound. That's how you know you're burning fat. That's the real thing. Sleep. Poor sleep decreases leptin, increases ghrelin, and leads to high calorie intake the next day. You just, you're gonna lose the battle with the brain the next day. It's gonna be ravenous, and you're gonna want to eat. And that's what poor sleep does to us as well. Throws off that whole circadian rhythm. Testosterone, testosterone and estrogen play a role too. Low T in men or estrogen dominance in women can slow results. And discuss natural ways to optimize this stuff: strength training, adequate protein, good fats, quality sleep, managing stress with supervised counsel on that for you. But the basics are the basics, and you can start attempting them today if you want by following the basics, finding your base metabolic rate, your caloric maintenance, decreasing that by a little bit, calculating how many grams of protein you need from that. You're like, okay, I'm 200 pounds. Uh I need one gram of protein per pound, 200, four grams of uh four calories per gram of protein. I need 200. That's 800 of my calories per day has to be from protein. You just say, okay, my my maintenance level is 2100. I want to do a little bit of the deficit. I'm gonna do it by 300 and bring this down to 1800. 1800 calories for the day, 800 is coming from protein, 600 or 800 is coming from carbs. That's 1600. I'm left with two, 300 calories left for fat. That's it. That's what any personal trainer is gonna do for you is start there and see how you adapt week to week. You can do this on your own just through diet. The weight loss pyramid or framework you can share with anyone is uh from most important to least important is the mindset we need here is adherence and consistency. Weight loss is consistency over time. The caloric balance, always playing with that calorie balance, micronutrient ratios, training and meat, sleep and stress, and supplements and enhancers. If the top, you know, supplements, fancy hacks is all someone focuses on, they'll fail. The foundation must come first. Adherence and consistency to the fundamentals calories in, calories out, calorie balance, micronutrient ratio, training and what you do in the exercises, sleep and recovery and stress management, and then the littlest on the top is your supplements and enhancers to help you with things to give you what you need. Sustainable habits that you can create. Use reverse dieting phase after a cut to re-step stabilize metabolism. Don't stay in calorie deficit for too long. Don't live in it all year round. Uh, you know, prioritize nutrition like athletes do. Follow Tom Brady. Follow someone you look up to, do what they do, follow those recommendations. Um, trust me, if they're doing something that doesn't work or it's a crash diet or a fad, they're probably not doing it. Like elite athletes and things like that, they're not doing that. They're doing consistency over time. Incorporate re-feed or higher carb days to reset leptin and physiological motivation. So when you start to maybe you get bad night's sleep or you start to get ravenous, maybe it's a one cheat meal a week where you add in, you're like, that's it, Friday, we're going to Curaba. It's like, I just need to do this. Do it. It's listening to your body, suppressing or pushing through that and living in a calorie deficit for too long can cause issues. And then track behavioral goals for yourself: sleep hours, protein servings, the steps that you're getting per day, rather than just the scale weight, because that can be frustrating. It can stay the same for a long period of time. You can be like losing a pound a week, a pound a week, and then on week five, nothing happens. Week six, nothing happens. You're like, what is going on? You might actually be converting more lean muscle mass during that time. You actually might be doing something right at that time. Really hard to just use the scale and wonder what's going on. Maybe you've got to use the bathroom. Maybe you've got to go have a bowel movement, and then you'll drop almost a pound, right? So there's too much variation in there to just look at the scale each and every day or each and every week. There's some red flags in the modern weight loss culture. Lose 30 pounds in 30 days. Our clinic is known to do this, lose 20 pounds in 30 days. We have this as well. It's metabolic disaster waiting to happen for a lot of people without supervision. And that's why we cap it in six weeks. We don't allow people to go longer than six weeks, and then we re-feed their bodies on purpose to never decrease their BMR over time. We don't want to decrease their basal metabolic rate into the future, otherwise, they won't be able to go back to eating because their basal metabolic weight rate will be too low. Endless cardio. If anybody tells you to just keep doing cardio, cardio, cardio, without strength training, it's gonna lead to skinny fat where we burn a lot of muscle down, but we don't burn a lot of fat. And constant calorie restrictions increases cortisol, uh, diet, decreases libido energy, and thyroid output. Don't do it for too long. I like 12-week rules at max, and then make a change. You've got to change, you gotta refeed, you got to reverse diet for a few weeks. Uh, true weight loss isn't about starving your body, it's about teaching it to work for you, not against you. Focus on building muscle, sleeping well, managing stress, eating enough of the right foods. That's how you create a body that burns fat naturally and keeps it off. No injections are ever required for this. Never have been for an entire human history. It's calories in, calories out. Try this on your own. If you have any questions, reach out to us. We're here for you. Info at fulllifetampa.com. If you're curious about any of the weight loss options that we have, most of them can be done virtually. We can do a virtual consult with you. We can talk about these things. You can do it in person. If you're curious about our whole food diet that we do with intermittent fasting, that works really well. And then we got a lot of stuff that we can help you as well on. So give that a shot. Reach out to us, info at Full Life Tampa. Live well, live healthy, have a great week, and take care.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host