Nourished Newsletter

My most popular newsletters from last year:

Here’s a few examples of my best newsletters, so you can see what you’re signing up for! Transparency is what we’re all about, and the newsletter is no different.

Newsletter 1: Why is everyone talking about protein?

We all hear about protein all the time. It seems like everyone wants us to get more of it, but why do we need protein? What is it good for? And how do you get it?

Why do I need protein?

Protein is found in every part of your body including your organs, tissues, muscles and even your hormones.

• Protein supports lean muscle retention

  • When losing fat without enough protein, your body will get the protein that it needs by using its own muscle tissue, so you’ll lose muscle along with fat. We obviously don’t want that!

• Protein is made up of amino acids

  • These are essential for the building of muscle in the gym and the repairing of muscle on recovery days.

  • Your organs and daily body processes also need these amino acids to function

  • These amino acids are also used to repair organ and muscle damage from day to day wear and tear

• Protein has the highest thermic effect of food

  • Your body uses between 15-30% of the calories in protein to digest and absorb it for use

• Protein keeps you full!

  • It’s much easier to stick to your weight loss and nutrition goals when you aren’t hungry

  What foods have protein?

  There are so many options! 

  • Meats (beef, pork, game meat) 

  • Poultry (chicken, turkey, duck)

  • Eggs/egg whites 

  • Seafood (salmon, tuna, white fish, scallops, shrimp, poke) 

  • Greek yogurt or cottage cheese

  • Cow or soy milk or Kefir

  • Cheese

  • Lean Jerky (watch the sugar!)

  • Legumes (beans, lentils, peas) -  also counts as a veggie

  • Tofu, tempeh, seitan 

  • Meat substitutes like Impossible and Beyond 

  • Veggie burgers

  • Protein, collagen, or peanut powder

  Note that quinoa and peanuts/nuts are not on this list. That's because they have only 10-15% of calories from protein. 

   

  If you are looking at a food label, a trick is to add a “0” to the end of the protein number. If that number is higher than the total calories in the food, then its a good protein food. 

   

  For example, if a protein bar has 200 calories and 10g protein, we can use this trick and see that when we add a zero to the end of the protein grams, it isn't higher than the total calories. This is not a high protein food and is just being marketed that way. 

What does that look like to eat enough protein?

It's hard to picture what this can look like in a normal day - luckily your friendly neighborhood dietitian is here to help you with that! 

I have a bunch of examples with REALISTIC days of eating 125g of protein that you can find on my Instagram or in the Protein Power Plan.

Newsletter 2: Can You Lose Fat While Gaining Muscle?

I can't believe we're already 2 weeks into 2025!  I've been answering a lot of questions - with our clients, people I meet at parties, on reddit, instagram…. the list goes on. I love it, its super fun for me and I love helping people. That's what keeps me going!

There's a question I keep seeing, and odds are if others are asking it, you might be wondering the same thing too! 

How to lose fat & gain muscle

In order to gain muscle, you need to be exercising your muscles in a way that pushes your limits, which tells your body that you need MORE muscle fibers there. This also requires calories (fuel) to be able to build that muscle. Muscle building is an anabolic, or additive process.

In order to lose fat, you must be burning more calories (fuel) than you are eating. Fat loss is a catabolic, or subtractive process. 

These two goals are directly opposed to each other, and trying to do both is going to leave you frustrated and feeling like you're failing. 

In some cases you can do both:

1. If you're starting a new lifting program or have returned to training after a long break. This lasts around 3 weeks.

2. If you were previously not eating a high protein diet, and start eating more protein while strength training. This also lasts around 3 weeks.

3. You're eating maintenance calorie levels, and slowly trading fat for muscle. Generally you won't lose much fat doing this, I'd say at most 1 pound a month of fat traded for muscle for women, double for men.

4. You're taking steroids. Let's not pick that one!

NOTE! When starting to lift weights, its very common to build muscle while losing fat for 3-4 weeks. This can be very frustrating if you are only using the scale to track your progress. This is why I also recommend taking measurements and progress photos.

Because you're losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time, the scale stays the same but your body is changing dramatically. Trust the process. 

My Recommendation:

Pick one goal. You're either in a calorie deficit (fat loss) or calorie maintenance or surplus (muscle gain). If you end up gaining a bit of muscle during fat loss, that's awesome! But if you don't, that's normal too. 

The goal in a calorie deficit (fat loss) phase is to MAINTAIN the muscle you've got. This will make it look and feel like you've gained muscle, because the percentage of your body weight from muscle will go up and the muscle will be revealed from under the fat!

As you can see from this chart, nutrition really is the most important factor for fat loss, which is why you probably won't see results if you only focus on workouts.

I'll be going more into each of these categories next week (if you want that info now, check out this podcast episode where I dive into it). 

But what you can see is that nutrition is your top priority for fat loss. Eating in a calorie deficit is the most important (I recommend using an app like My Fitness Pal to track your calories, at least for a few days).  

It's also important to be eating enough protein so that your body has the building blocks for the 100's of things protein does for us.

3rd most important is strength training 2-4 times a week. Honestly, if you do those things you'll be doing great. Don't worry about the rest too much, you have enough to focus on! 

How many calories and protein do you need?

I made a calculator to figure that for you! You can find that here

Newsletter 3: Eat meals, not just snacks

A huge reason that people can't lose weight might surprise you: they aren't not eating enough. 

I know that sounds crazy, because we're eating more calories than ever before!! But in helping hundreds of clients reach their weight loss goals through nutrition alone over the last few years, I've noticed a pattern:

Many of us skip meals and basically live on snacks and nibbles. 

This means that we're not getting the nutrients that we need, and then want more food. This is completely natural when you think about it, but so many of us feel like total failures when we “can't control" our appetite at the end of the day. 

Snack foods also tend not to be very satisfying per calorie (imagine how full you'd be after 14 tortilla chips vs 4 oz of chicken breast, even if they're the same # of calories!!)

If you feel called out right now, then you (probably) need to eat bigger, more substantial meals. 

The FIRST thing we do with our clients is getting them eating a quality breakfast and lunch. The difference they see is astonishing: more energy, more focus, more weight loss, better sleep and more. 

You want to make sure your breakfast and lunch have protein (at least 25g, 30 is better), carbs, color (a fruit or veggie), and some fats.

Here's some examples of what it might look like to level up your breakfast and lunch (these are posts I adapted from examples from instagram a few months ago, you can click on each to go to the full post)