Episode 102- Water Retention 101: 10 Ways to Beat Bloat and Feel Better Fast
Episode 102 Show Notes
Ever look in the mirror after a trip or a salty meal and think, “Why do I look so puffy?” You’re not alone—and it’s not always fat. It might just be water weight.
In today’s episode, Tiffany Wickes, certified nutrition and fitness coach (and mom of 7), breaks down the real reasons behind bloating and water retention—and what you can do about it naturally and safely.
We’ll talk about:
What causes water retention (hint: it’s not just salt)
Why under-eating and dehydration can actually make you retain more water
The surprising connection between stress, blood sugar, and bloating
My personal story of gaining 4 pounds of water weight on vacation—and how I dropped it in 2 days
Why sleep and hormones play a huge role in how your body looks and feels
Tips to reduce puffiness, including foods that help flush water out
How movement (even just walking) impacts digestion and water balance
What to look out for if your bloating might be something more serious
You’ll also learn about:
Potassium-rich foods that help regulate hydration
Estrogen dominance and how fiber helps you eliminate excess hormones
Why canned and processed foods sneak in more sodium than you think
A few tough-love thoughts on “not having time to cook”
This episode is packed with education, tough truths, and real-life mom moments (including recording with a kid in the background). If you’ve been feeling bloated, tired, or frustrated with your body—this one’s for you.
Links & Mentions:
Brewer’s Diet for Pregnancy (for listeners who are pregnant)
My personal tips for batch cooking and keeping whole food prep simple
Previous episode on blood sugar, stress, and continuous glucose monitoring
Want more 1:1 support or have questions?
Send me a message or hop over to our Strong Mama community and let’s chat.
If this episode helped you feel seen or gave you an action step you’re excited to try, please leave a review and share it with another woman who needs this encouragement.
Stay strong, mamas—and don’t forget to drink your water.
Thank you for supporting my small business. Here are some brands I trust and use myself with a discount for you:
Equip Protein - 15% off with code WICKES
Masa Chips - 20% off code STRONG $50 or more
Let’s Connect! I share tons of fitness tips and more behind the scenes on my social accounts.
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Hey, it's your own mamas, welcome back. Oftentimes I like to search the internet and see like what are women looking for when it comes to fat loss information. And turns out they're primarily interested in sustainable and healthy strategies that address their unique physiological needs and hormone fluctuations. So they're wanting to know like how to achieve fat loss without resorting to extreme measures like restrictive dieting or over exercising.
which is clearly detrimental to your health, I know because I've been there. So specifically, women are curious about the role of hormones, metabolism, and body composition in fat loss, as well as effective exercise and dietary approaches. So here's more of a detailed breakdown of what people are wanting to know and my thoughts on it. So first off is you're gonna understand the science of fat loss. So hormonal influence, women are super curious about how hormones like estrogen and thyroid hormones
affect fat storage and metabolism. And they're wanting to understand how hormone fluctuations throughout the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, menopause impact their ability to lose fat. So this, it's such a nuanced answer because everybody's hormonal influence is going to be different depending on how old you are, whether you're on hormone replacement therapy, whether you've had cancer and you've been blocking hormones, whether you're a young girl, older woman, post,
pre, peri, menopause. You wouldn't know what your hormones are doing unless you're tested for it. However, regardless of what each individual hormone profile is doing on each individual woman because it is so personalized, I can say this across the board that hormonal influence from products is super important, especially for children and the elderly. mean, really your entire lifespan is important.
When you consume products, cleaning products, skincare products, plastics, all of those, a lot of them on the market unless you are really in tuned with great skincare that doesn't use endocrine disrupting chemicals in them or a bunch of plastics or Xenoestrogen. So they really mimic estrogen in the body and then create this like fake estrogen that your body recognizes as estrogen.
Tiffany Wickes (02:25.494)
without being super in tune to that, you could be exposing yourself to hormone dysfunction without even knowing it. Sleep is another huge influence for hormonal dysfunction. Most people are under slept significantly. And if they are in bed for the prescribed amount of time, you know, eight or nine hours, they may only be actually sleeping seven of those hours. And again, there, can do a whole podcast episode on sleep strategies.
However, that will influence hormones and hormones will influence sleep. Like they have this, you know, inverse relationship. You could be trying to sleep really well and your hormones are dragging that up or you're not sleeping well because of other factors like caffeine, alcohol, screen time, stress, not enough movement. And then that ends up impacting your hormones. You see what I'm saying? So sleep is a huge factor. How you eat is massive when it comes to hormonal influence.
so there you go. So hormone influence, you won't know unless you're tested, but across the board, you need to sleep well. And like I said, sleep well, you could break that down into a bunch of different categories regarding, the temperature of sleep, not eating with the exception of this little caveat. did recent research recently that said if you had a 40 gra- okay. So there, let me just stop for a second. That research was done on healthy young men. However,
I don't think it would hurt you at all as a woman if you partake in this and just like report back, right? Test it on yourself and see what you think. But it was consuming a 40 gram protein shake. Okay. A shake does not require a lot of digestion. So it doesn't fit into the don't eat right before going to bed category because it impacts your sleep. A 40 gram protein shake right before bed actually sustained their muscular growth hormones and
helped get them stronger and then regulate blood sugar while they were sleeping. So there you go. I think you could probably, you know, do a little test on yourself and see what you think on that one. However, back to what women want to know. first, so second thing is, is metabolic differences. So women naturally have higher body fat percentage and lower muscle mass compared to men, which can affect their metabolism and caloric expenditure. So
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when you understand these differences, it's crucial for setting realistic expectations and choosing appropriate strategies. every most, except for now, I mean, there's a lot of emerging data that's coming out that is specific to female fitness, which I think is fantastic because previously all of the fitness research had been done primarily on men. So we were just taking this archetypal, like this is what works with fitness and nutrition and cold plunging, you know,
alternate heat and cold therapy and then just copy paste apply to women as if we were just smaller men. Not true. We are completely different beings. Our hormones work differently. Our metabolic processes work differently. But in general, like you need to be in a caloric deficit. The problem right now is that people are hearing deficit and they're thinking extreme deficit. So if you're
you know, basal metabolic rate, like the amount of calories you need simply to live is 1800 calories a day. People are like, well, 1800, like that's just for biological functioning, like existing in the world, opening your eyes and being able to talk and then have your heart beat, your stomach churn and your bladder to pee, right? Just basic metabolic functioning, not even getting up and eating and walking and pooping and peeing and going to the mailbox.
if that's 1800 calories a day and then you add in just meat, those are non-exercise activity thermogenics, those are movements that you do outside of a prescribed exercise routine, that all burns calories. And then you add a fitness routine on top of it. Caloric deficit, people are in too much of a deficit, way too much of a deficit, which is why they're not losing fat. So yes, you need to be in a deficit, but not the extreme one you're walking in my program with because I've seen you.
I've seen you coming in here like I'm consuming 1400 calories a day. I'm like, my gosh, you need more food. You need more food. So anyway, we all have metabolic differences and your lifestyle is going to impact that your age, your activity, your personal goals. Like it's all very unique to the woman, which is, or man, which is why coaching is so important when you start out on your fitness journey. Like maybe you don't need to keep a coach forever, but when you're first starting out and you know,
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Absolutely nothing about this. So, so helpful to have a coach. All right, so next one is body composition. So women typically are interested in like, do I lose body fat and maintain muscle for just metabolism and overall health? Okay, first off, girl, you gotta eat. Like I said, you've gotta be eating and you've gotta be strength training a couple of times a week and you gotta do it pretty heavy. So we've gotta ditch the cardio queen type of mentality and you've gotta be strength training.
And walking, walking is so darn underrated, but it is incredibly good for your body. So effective fat loss strategies. So nutritional guidance. If you're looking for practical advice on creating balanced and sustainable diets that support fat loss, then you have to, like I said, understand what a caloric deficit looks like. Macronutrient ratios, super important proteins, carbs, fats, and the importance of nutrient rich foods.
you can be in a caloric deficit and be eating processed foods, but your body doesn't emit the GLP-1. By the way, you do that naturally based off of satiety. Satiety is reached once your body evaluates what's in your gut and says, hmm, does this fit my caloric mineral profile? I need to thrive. If the answer is yes, your body emits GLP-1, you're full, you stop eating. If your food isn't matching that, you're not
emitting the GLP-1, which is probably why you're overeating. So the GLP-1s have a place, right? But they don't have a common place. And I think right now people are trying to use it very commonly when it should not be used commonly. You should start with eating a whole foods diet. I feel like I say this all, I mean, I do, I say it all the time. Whole foods diet. Okay. So the exercise recommendation and what that diet, what that
distribution of macronutrients look like is going to be different for every person. Like I said, I cannot give you a recommendation without actually talking to you because I have no idea what your history has been like. I don't know if you have a history of eating disorder. I'm not sure if you have allergies. I'm not sure if your gut is actually processing these macronutrients well or not. Like I have no idea, but I mean a 40-30-30 split generally is what most people would start with. However, it also has a whole lot to do on whether you have adrenal.
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dysfunction. If you are totally maxed out with your adrenals, we're going to change your macros a little bit and you're, we're going to change how you exercise, which is my next category is exercise recommendations. So types of exercises that are effective for fat loss, like zone two cardio, which is walking strength training and high intensity interval training. I've talked about those like ad nauseum, but we'll go here again. So how you incorporate those into your fitness routine. Most of you like y'all are doing too much.
You're just doing way too much. I love to move just like the next hard charging woman out there, but y'all are just, you're doing too much. You need to chill out a little bit, pull it back and your strength training sessions really do not need to exceed 35 to 45 minutes. And your HIIT training absolutely doesn't need to exceed 45 minutes in an entire week, not in one episode, like in an entire week. So if you really want to do 10 minutes of HIIT four days a week, knock yourself out. However, 45 minutes, five days a week of HIIT, you're doing
too much and you're increasing your cortisol. You're probably not feeding yourself effectively because somehow we've told women you must starve in order to lose fat. So far not been true in my training and my training of all these clients, but you are over-exerting yourself. All right, so your lifestyle factors. Women are, I mean, at least in my space are becoming increasingly more aware of the importance on lifestyle factors like sleep, stress management, overall wellbeing, like your own
desire and zeal for life and your happiness just as a state of being is huge. Okay. I read a study recently about just people who are generally happy, lose more fat. Like if you're looking at your body and shaming it and being pissed off at it, it's like, yeah, screw you girl. I'm not doing what you want. I mean, there's, there's just some weird connection between just overall joy and then your body being able to release fat. Okay. It's a thing. It really is. So
Here you go, weight loss, speed, lots of women. So let's go ahead and address these concerns and misconceptions. People are women more particularly are so concerned with what the scale is doing. I want you to stop measuring your progress by the scale per se. Okay. I want you to
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stop tracking that as your sole piece of data. You can use that as one of another component, but you can also get DEXA scans. So you can look at your distribution of fat and muscle and your bone density and stuff, because that composition is going to change over time and it should. So your number on the scale and how fast you lose fat is really not always congruent with one another, because if you are gaining muscle and you're losing fat, the scale will oftentimes not move at all.
Okay. You'll be like, well, I've only lost three pounds. Okay. But how are your clothes fitting? How are you looking in the mirror? How are you feeling in general? Are you super energetic? Are you feeling stronger? Like evaluate more on what your body image is, your self-esteem, your negative self-talk is absolutely crushing your individual fat loss goals. So when you're looking for support and guidance, having a personalized plan helps out a ton because you are an individual person. don't,
lump. So everyone has access to our training, right? However, our fitness programming, there are three different levels of programming that you can utilize based off where you're at. So we have advanced, we have very basics, and then we have the like normal entry level stuff. We even have chair fitness, okay? If you're a person whose mobility is compromised, either by age or injury, that is huge that you can do a chair fitness routine that we have available.
Getting personalized nutritional guidance, I think is massive because like I said, cannot, mean telling you what my macros are does you no good whatsoever because you're not me. You don't have my life. You don't have seven kids. You're not married to a pilot. You don't live at a certain elevation. You know, like everything I do is not what you do and everything you do is not what she does. So I can't give you personalized macros unless I actually talk to you. And also having community support is huge. There's so much value in connecting.
with other people who are on a similar journey, you get support, motivation. Well, motivation is internal, but you can get some...
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like inspiration from other people, right? And then share their experiences. So once you understand these key areas, then you can approach your fat loss with a more informed and empowered mindset rather than just focusing on, you know, focusing on just scale weight or you're looking for sustainable lifestyle changes that promote your overall wellbeing and your health, right? That's where I want to go with my entire coaching program is
teaching women how to feel good. Once you feel good, energetic, happy, excited, then the body composition follows. It always does. So focus first on health and the body count will follow. I hope this was helpful for you. If you want to share this with another woman or man in your life that you think could use it, please do so. If you have not yet rated my podcast,
do it only if it's good. If you have a crappy rating, then just tell me. Okay. Just tell me here's how I think you could improve and then I will work on improving it. Okay. So five star rating, leave a great comment and share it with your friends. I appreciate you guys so much. Have a great day and as always stay strong mamas and keep showing up. Bye.