FHP 609- Fat Loss Is NOT A Lifestyle

FHP 609- Fat Loss Is NOT A Lifestyle

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TRANSCRIPT

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OPEN TRANSCRIPT

00:00
Hey guys, this is Cori from Redefining Strength. Welcome to the Fitness Hacks podcast. This is a show where I share all my free work on the nutrition tips. I’m not going to ever fill this episode with sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a review or leave a five-star rating or, even better, share it with someone you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know. So let’s jump right in.

00:27
1. Stop trying to build a lifestyle. So hear me out. When we approach working towards a weight loss goal or a muscle building goal, we think I have to create sustainable habits that become a lifestyle, and while that is partly true, I think we’ve gone too far down this road of trying to make everything feel sustainable, right to start, feel like a lifestyle right to start. And it’s simply not going to, because to reach a goal, we don’t have to reach a new set point we’ve never been at. We’re going to have to do things we’ve never done and they’re not going to feel natural, normal, because what feels sustainable, what feels like a lifestyle, is what we’ve always done, what we want to fall back into naturally, even unconsciously. So I think this attitude of I have to create this lifestyle holds us back from implementing hard changes at times, and I was trying to think of a way of describing it, because that doesn’t mean go do a cleanse, go do a fad diet, go do a diet with a label, something that is completely unsustainable, with no relation to your true lifestyle or what you honestly want to live like after you reach your goal. But I think it has to be this balance of realizing that what you do to reach a goal is not what you will do to maintain it.

01:38
So, in trying to think about this, I was trying to think about a great description of this, and it’s like you get to design a house from scratch. You’re going to build that foundation, you’re going to build that structure of that house and you want that to be perfect and set in place. That is learning about macros. That is learning about progressions. It is things that are unchanging. It is the fundamentals of working out and nutrition that you need to understand because you want that solid foundation. Because so often we don’t learn those things, we go into a fad diet and we’ve thrown up this haphazard house and it’s why it falls down. But once you build that house, once you understand macros, once you understand the basics of working out, you have your program design. You know that you have to repeat workouts.

02:14
Once you have some of those fundamental habits and routines and like understandings in place of what it takes to reach a goal or what it takes to adjust your lifestyle, or even that self-awareness of where you’re at and what you might need to change, then you can start to decorate the house right. When it’s built, you can decorate it and as you decide. You know the f the f fashions go this way. You can change the decorations as you make more money and want to add in some extra elegant stuff or stuff becomes old. You can change out all the inner workings. So if you go through menopause, maybe the dressings in the house are chaff to change, right. But we can shift as our lifestyle, needs and goals evolve. But we want it to be the decorations in the house, the wallpaper or lack of wallpaper, painting the furniture, all those different things that we’re shifting, because it’s a lot easier to change those things out over time than it is to rebuild a shaky foundation and we risk everything collapsing in.

03:01
So we want to think about building a lifestyle as can I understand the fundamentals of things? Can I understand okay, everything I’m doing has to come back to the protein, carbs and fat I’m consuming. I can adjust the types of food. I could decide to go paleo, I could decide to go vegan, but ultimately the macros matter most in terms of the results. So I can change the types of food I’m including. I can choose to cut out bread if I think that’s going to help me get better results, but I have to understand the macro breakdowns that cutting out that bread is really going to create. We want to understand the fundamentals. When we understand the macros and what we need as we reach our goal to now maintain our results, we can shift our macro breakdowns to then gain muscle. We can shift our macro breakdowns to then be able to perform in an endurance sport. When we haven’t done an endurance sport, we can shift our macros. We’re changing the exact implementation of those macros, but macros are the foundation, they are the structure of the house. The other things are the decoration, exactly what ratios we use.

03:52
So, as you’re looking to make a change, as you’re looking to achieve a fat loss goal and maybe even reach a level of leanness you’ve never achieved before. Stop thinking it’s going to feel sustainable. Stop thinking that thing that you’re going to be doing is a lifestyle, because it honestly isn’t going to feel that way. A lot of the changes you might look back on and be like, oh, that wasn’t so bad, or I wish I’d done it sooner, and a lot of the fundamentals you’re putting into place again, the macro breakdowns or the workout progressions that are clearly designed, will carry you through to maintaining. But how you’re implementing those things will shift your lifestyle.

04:22
Your diet, your workout should be constantly evolving and if you think about it, we do get this attitude a lot more with diet of. This should be a lifestyle, it should feel sustainable. I have to have this balance right. Cutting out foods to reach a goal is not sustainable, but understanding why maybe I chose to eliminate those foods for a period could be sustainable. But we do this a lot more with diet, where we think it should be a lifestyle, or we go to extreme restriction, versus with workouts. We kind of have accepted oh, I’m going to do this program. Okay, now I’m going to shift to this program when I want to reach a new goal, we have to take that same approach. But I want you to get out of this mindset that it’s going to feel like a lifestyle, especially to start, and that what you’re doing right now will become the thing you do forever, because it’s only the underlying principles, it’s only that foundation of the house that we don’t want to change. We want to be able to decorate it anyway we’d like, as the wind even strikes us, as we want to work towards another goal. So hopefully that analogy helped and I hope that as you’re working towards your goals, things have felt hard, if they felt unsustainable, if they felt different. Good, it probably means you’re on the right track to achieve a new result, because what you do to achieve your goal is not what you will do to maintain it, and the more we can focus on that, the more we can create the principles that build a lifestyle while making the changes and the hard changes that we actually need right now to move forward.

05:28

Thanks for listening to the Fitness Hacks podcast. Again, this is the place where I share all my free workout and nutrition tips. I’m never going to run sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a rating review or share it with somebody you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and it would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know.

*Please Note: this transcript is auto-generated and there may be some errors in the transcript

FHP 608 – My Results Stopped! (Is It Really A Plateau?)

FHP 608 – My Results Stopped! (Is It Really A Plateau?)

LISTEN HERE

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WATCH HERE

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TRANSCRIPT

7

OPEN TRANSCRIPT

Cori

00:00
Hey guys, this is Cori from Redefining Strength. Welcome to the Fitness Hacks podcast. This is a show where I share all my free work on the nutrition tips. I’m not going to ever fill this episode with sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a review or leave a five star rating or, even better, share it with someone you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and would mean the world to me and possibly change the life of someone you know. So let’s jump right in.

00:29

Progress is never linear Along the way. There will be plateaus, times when your results slow or even seem to stop building, and too often when this happens, we get frustrated and we give up. We stop doing all of the habits that moved us forward, but this leads to us just regaining the weight and losing all of the progress we’ve made. That’s why I want to go over why we often see our results plateau and what we can do about it. First, I do want to clarify what a plateau actually is. This isn’t just not seeing results for one week. It isn’t even gaining a pound one week after losing to the week prior. A true plateau is at least four weeks of no changes whatsoever no changes in measurements, no changes in weight, no improvements in workouts, nothing. And it’s at least four weeks for a number of reasons. For instance, a woman with her period will see fluctuation based on the time of her cycle. A woman in menopause may have changing hormone levels leading to slower changes. As we get older, results simply happen slower even as we don’t have the optimal hormone environment we did when we were younger. And an advanced trainee may have adapted and can handle more. So it actually needs a longer time and greater training stimulus to see results. Basically, you can’t just say you’ve hit a plateau because results aren’t happening fast enough, and while we never will happen fast enough, and while we don’t want to keep repeating something that isn’t working, we also need to realize what is realistic before we make a change. And the answer when we do plateau isn’t just doing more. We can’t just keep trying to slash our calories lower or train harder and longer. That may even sabotage our long-term results. So here are five reasons your results may have plateaued and how to address these situations.

02:18

First, a plateau doesn’t actually mean you aren’t still making progress. I did mention this because you may just be in a dead zone. You may be in that phase where your body is fighting the weight loss process, because our body does want to fight the process. It believes where we’re at is natural and normal and taking in fewer calories seems like a threat to your survival. Your body doesn’t want to lose weight, so it’s going to do everything it can to resist those changes and hang onto the fat stores’ fuel for future use.

02:47

This is when you have to stay consistent. You’ve hit a period where you’re doing the right habits, but things just need to accumulate more before you see the payoff. It’s almost like you just have to give your body time to embrace and trust that it can still survive as you make the changes. So, while it feels like nothing’s happening and you’ve hit a dead zone, avoid the desire to want to do more or change things up. We have to remind ourselves that we don’t need more tactics, lower carbs or new exercises or fancy tools or crazy fat burning supplements. We just need more time, more time doing the habits that add up. So, as hard as it may be, your plateau may just be that you haven’t been in long enough. You saw that initial pop of results with your first big changes. But now you just need to keep up the plan and things will snowball. Stay consistent and keep tracking what you’re doing. Realize that results are accumulating and will only show if you don’t give up.

03:44

The next reason we often plateau is that we haven’t reassessed our needs in a while. Often it takes longer to reach a goal and along that journey we have to adjust and evolve. Nothing works forever. Our lifestyle and schedule may change, impacting how we need to train, and if our training shifts, we may need to adjust our nutrition to match. Even our body and hormones may shift, impacting what we need. What you need before menopause is different than what you’re going to need during menopause or even after menopause, and if we don’t adapt as our body needs, goals and lifestyle evolve, we won’t continue to see progress towards our goals and may even find we go backwards.

04:24

So if you haven’t assessed how all of the systems are working together and making you feel it may be time to review everything, too often we emphasize just one component over looking at how all the systems are working together. We seek a better move, a better macro ratio, we search for an ideal, but one component alone doesn’t fix a broken system. So if your results have stalled, assess how everything in your lifestyle is working together and if it’s actually meeting what your body and even mind need right now. And as you assess, you’re going to need to be honest with yourself. I bring this up because too often we’ve plateaued because our consistency simply isn’t there. We’ve gotten lazy with habits we’ve gotten comfortable with. We see progress and start to put some of our healthy habits on autopilot, and often 1% deviations over time lead to us drifting further and further, of course, and so we aren’t even implementing a lot of what we need and we start to regain the weight. But we can stop this drift off course before it happens, by honestly assessing, when results are plateaued, if we’re truly being as consistent as we think.

05:27

Tracking your food, recording your workouts to watch your improvements and consistency can help us stay on track. What gets measured gets managed. Don’t let how you feel about your habit color what’s actually going on. Don’t make the excuse you’re being good enough actually slide. If you’ve hit that plateau, it’s time to see room for improvement and growth with the habits you’re already doing. Find those deviations in your consistency and address them. Once you have, you can then assess if those habits are no longer in line with what you need. But don’t stop doing something until you know your consistency is there to validate needing a change.

06:04

Too often we stop doing what could lead to growth, thinking it isn’t working just because we ignored the inconsistencies in our calories or macros or even workouts that are actually there. Along with ignoring those inconsistencies that allow us to feel like we’re being better than we are, we stop pushing our comfort zone. We stop building off our healthy habits. We make one or two easier changes that lead to results initially, but we don’t keep going. But to reach a new and better result, a goal we’ve not achieved for a while, or maybe even ever, we need to keep pushing our habits and lifestyle forward.

06:36

As weird as it sounds, you’re creating a new you, a new identity and lifestyle as you work to become the person that has the goals and results you want. That means we have to keep making changes, even when we start to feel more uncomfortable. And while I know this isn’t a popular opinion or a fun thing, to own success is sacrifice. The loftier our goals, the more we have to be willing to push ourselves. So if you’ve found your results plateauing, ask yourself. Am I continuing to push myself to make changes or have I fallen back into what’s comfortable? Well, we don’t want to be changing everything all the time. We can’t stop driving forward and become complacent.

07:14

If we want results, and throughout your weight loss journey, you need to give yourself credit for the changes and results that are building, because too often we just say my results have plateaued, when results are actually snowballing. We’re just choosing to measure progress in only one way. If we want to lose weight and we don’t, on the scale one week, we can decide we aren’t progressing and give up on something that’s working. When really results are building. We just happen to eat later than I before, or drink more water or do something that made the scale fluctuate up that single day and instead of recognizing that our pants are fitting looser, or that our lifts went up that week, or that we’re sleeping better or our aches and pains have diminished, we say we aren’t progressing because we just didn’t see progress in one specific way. That’s why we need to manage our expectations and set more than one way of determining success. The more ways we measure success, the more ways we give ourselves to be successful, and this is what keeps us moving forward, to give results, time to snowball. So just because the scale isn’t changing doesn’t mean results aren’t building.

08:18

Track other complementary goals that help you repeat the habits you need to keep moving forward. Track improvements in how you feel, how you’re sleeping, your energy levels, your lifts, your runs, your rides. Even track the consistency and celebrate wins in repeating those habits. But realize that often what we even label as a plateau really isn’t one. We just didn’t see progress in one specific way, even though we’re moving forward. Remember that plateaus are normal and they’re just chances to assess how things are going and if we truly are meeting ourselves where we’re at.

 

Don’t simply give up. Don’t simply try and do more. Simply use this as a time to assess and give results. Time to build as you meet yourself where you’re at with those habit changes. Thanks for listening to Fitness Hacks podcast podcast. Again, this is the place where I share all my free workout and nutrition tips. I’m never going to run sponsorships or ask you to buy anything. All I ask in return is, if you’re enjoying the podcast, to leave a rating review or share it with someone you think it might help. This will only take a few minutes and it would mean the world to me and possibly change life with someone you know.

FHP 545 – Menopause – “The Big Change”

FHP 545 – Menopause – “The Big Change”

Life is about constant exploration. About constant growth.

About constantly challenging ourselves to learn and improve.

We should always be setting goals – whether they are performance, lifestyle, monetary, aesthetic…

And we should always be CHANGING to reach them.

Our identity is more fluid than we realize and at some point, we almost start fearing changes to it over seeking to explore it.

And when we do, our lifestyle also stops evolving, which can keep us stuck repeating the same habits that aren’t moving us forward – even fearing change.

That’s why I want to talk about some shifts to both your nutrition and workouts you may need to make as you get older especially as you go through a time actually called THE CHANGE aka Menopause!

Lead RS Dietitian Michelle will also share some helpful macro ratio adjustments that can help you feel your best and keep your body stronger till your final day on this planet!

00:00 – Resisting Change
01:30 – “You’ve Changed”
07:12 – Menopause and Aging
28:19 – workout changes

FHP 542 – STOP The Extreme Diets And Workouts To Lose Weight

FHP 542 – STOP The Extreme Diets And Workouts To Lose Weight

Stop the extremes. Stop the restriction. Stop pushing yourself to the point you want to give up constantly.

Instead embrace finding your balance and realize why some changes are more of a struggle.

Start to listen to what your body and mind are telling you and what is realistic for your lifestyle!

In this episode of the Fitness Hacks Podcast, Michelle is going to go over how you can start to learn to eat more intuitively while focusing on a specific goal and I’ll share both more nutrition and workout tips to help you meet yourself where you are at to move forward.

But first…I want to talk about something many of us have thought….

“Why is it so much harder to change your diet than to workout more?!”

5 Diet and Exercise Myths

5 Diet and Exercise Myths

There are lots of different opinions and perspectives out there. 

And while I think this is a good thing, it can also lead to us creating beliefs and habits that don’t serve us.

That’s why in this episode I’m excited to chat with RS coach Cathy about some common diet and exercise myths she sees holding people back and even why there is no perfect workout or diet plan out there!

00:00 – Intro
00:42 – The “Perfect” Plan
02:18 – 5 Diet and Exercise Myths
29:40 – Your Magic Macros
35:38 – Workout Design

FHP 536 – Postpartum Fitness – What You Need To Know

FHP 536 – Postpartum Fitness – What You Need To Know

Are you a new mom juggling baby care and fitness goals? In this episode, I’m joined by my fabulous trainer Rachel, a new mom, who shares her real-life experiences and strategies to balance motherhood and personal fitness. In this candid conversation, we uncover the often-unspoken realities of being a new parent, discussing the importance of setting realistic fitness goals, embracing constant life changes, and building a healthy lifestyle that includes the whole family.

Rachel discusses how she fits workouts into her hectic schedule without compromising on her role as a mom. We dissect the significance of creating a routine and schedule for workouts that fit seamlessly into your existing lifestyle. Furthermore, we highlight the importance of self-care and mental health in the journey of parenthood. Rachel emphasizes the need for new moms to learn when to hit the pause button, and why it’s essential to prioritize your own health and wellbeing, even amidst the chaos of motherhood.

We’ll also cover some practical meal prep hacks, which can make maintaining a healthy diet less of a chore. From bulk prepping to freezing meals, we dive into various strategies that can help you stay on track with your nutrition goals.

Learn my 3 step recipe to lose fat and keep it off without feeling miserable.

–> The 3-Step Recipe To Lasting Results