How To Find Your Maintenance Calories

Episode Summary: In this foundational episode, we break down the first essential step to sustainable fat loss in your 40s and beyond: finding your maintenance calories. Before jumping into a calorie deficit, extreme workouts, or restrictive diets, you need to know how much food your body actually needs to maintain its current weight. Why? Because without that baseline, you're just guessing—and guessing keeps you stuck.

We talk about:

• 🔍 What “maintenance” really means (it’s not eating less, it’s eating right)

• 🧠 Why most women underestimate how much they eat and overestimate how much they burn

• 🛑 The reason cutting calories too soon often leads to burnout, muscle loss, or plateau

• 🧮 How to find your true maintenance through food tracking, awareness, and patience

• 💪 The mindset shift: before losing fat, you need to prove you can fuel yourself consistently

This episode emphasizes that your metabolism isn’t broken—you're just not working with your body yet. Finding maintenance is about gathering data, building trust, and creating a launchpad for real fat loss—without wrecking your energy, hormones, or relationship with food.